Quoted: you guys hear that loud pop? that was 5subs head exploding

Keep trying guys.  Maybe you can make a 'one refinery country' into a credible military  threat yet.  16 combined intelligence services failed but maybe you folks can get there.

Israel must be constantly in peril to continue extracting billions from the US taxpayer.
No constant peril means lower welfare checks for the State of Israel.

Maybe North Yemen could be your next incredible enemy ??  Aw hell, just manufacture your own.




5sub

Not using your a acount today I see.

Any country that is an avowed enemy of ours, that is trying to acquire nuclear capability is a threat.

Not to mention they are supplying weapons and training to kill our troops. Once upon a time that was enough for a carte blanche.

Well, guys, for what it worth for you Americans, in Italy the majority believe that CIA (that intelligence agency that organized things like Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Raid on Teheran, or gave infos about WMD owned by Saddam Hussein... that one!!!) has been fooled again by USA enemies.

An on-line Opinion Poll asking to Italians if they really believe that Ahmadinejad & Co. really suspended in 2003 Iran's military nuclear program more than 57% of the voters answered "I don't believe Irans really suspended nuclear military program"...

Well, I think also American do not believe to CIA...

enriching U + not fully transparent = nuke program

No "if"s, "and"s or "but"s.

Quoted: Keep trying guys.  Maybe you can make a 'one refinery country' into a credible military  threat yet.  16 combined intelligence services failed but maybe you folks can get there. Israel must be constantly in peril to continue extracting billions from the US taxpayer. No constant peril means lower welfare checks for the State of Israel. Maybe North Yemen could be your next incredible enemy ??  Aw hell, just manufacture your own. 5sub Not using your a acount today I see.

Again an anti-Israel tirade from Subsailor. Your credibility is lower than Colin Powell's one...

Iran is all bark and no bite. They bark because they need to drive up their image in the eyes of the religious fanatics in their country to maintain a level of support they need to stay in power.

IMHO.

Quoted: Well, you guessed wrong... There just isn't anything in your links that is convincing. An uncontexted quote and an opinion piece by a glorified college prof simply don't cut it.

OK. I guess 80 years of a similar economy in the Soviet Union showed us nothing about the efficiencies in a command economy.

I guess the head of Iran's National Oil company saying the reserves in Iran are overstated isn't convincing.
http://www.odac-info.org/assessments/documents/MamdSal_25thNAEConf.pdf
www.usaee.org/.../submissions/OnlineProceedings/Paper%20for%20the%2027th%20North%20American%20Conference.doc

Of course he was in a better position to know being on the inside.

Oh well, you can lead a horse to water, but you shouldn't have to stick your head up its ass and suck to get it to drink. So I'm not going to try to get you to change your mind, which obviously will not be changed, because changing it would require you to give up your overly simplistic world view.

That is not to say that Iran should have anything that is dual use. Peaceful nuclear power I have no problem with. Those old Soviet designed reactors that require weapons grade or nearly weapons grade nuclear material to run them is another story altogether.

Quoted: Quoted: CIA's been duped before... If you're referring to the supposedly non-existant WMD in Iraq, don't buy the MSM's bullshit. There have been nearly 500 chemical and nerve agent munitions found since OIF-I. Did we find the proverbial "Motherload", the Wal-Mart sized warehouse full of 'em? No. But there have indeed been some found. But we wouldn't want facts to get in the way, would we?

NO... I'm not referring to that at all. I know about the WMDs.

CIA has been duped in different ways at different times... And they've been playing politics on and off for years anyway.

doesn't common sense tell you that Iran is still working on the bomb?  

The NIE report flies in the face of what we know is true of the world's leader in state sponsored terrorism.

Quoted: Quoted: CIA's been duped before... If you're referring to the supposedly non-existant WMD in Iraq, don't buy the MSM's bullshit. There have been nearly 500 chemical and nerve agent munitions found since OIF-I. Did we find the proverbial "Motherload", the Wal-Mart sized warehouse full of 'em? No. But there have indeed been some found. But we wouldn't want facts to get in the way, would we?

You mean like the FACT that all we have found are residue and 20 year old leftovers that Iraq had already acknowleded they had lost track of?

But hey, we won't get fooled again, right?

Quoted: doesn't common sense tell you that Iran is still working on the bomb?   The NIE report flies in the face of what we know is true of the world's leader in state sponsored terrorism.

Yeah, we have ONE report that claims Iran stopped... yet we have TONS of other evidence to the contrary.

Whoever said "Trust ... but verify" was a smart person. It applies here too.

Quoted: you guys hear that loud pop? that was 5subs head exploding

Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: CIA's been duped before... If you're referring to the supposedly non-existant WMD in Iraq, don't buy the MSM's bullshit. There have been nearly 500 chemical and nerve agent munitions found since OIF-I. Did we find the proverbial "Motherload", the Wal-Mart sized warehouse full of 'em? No. But there have indeed been some found. But we wouldn't want facts to get in the way, would we? You mean like the FACT that all we have found are residue and 20 year old leftovers that Iraq had already acknowleded they had lost track of? But hey, we won't get fooled again, right?

Yep, those munitions were totally harmless.

And since Iraq admitted they "lost track of them" them anyways, what the hell--why not believe them?

Munitions such as those DO have a shelf life you know (and it's a little longer than milk).

Rush is saying the WSJ reports the 3 main authors of the report are State Dept!!!

One of the main authors is a well known anti-Bush guy who endorses Iran's rights for a "peaceful" program.  This NEI was a treasonous lie.

More interesting dissemination of this latest NIE

Again, not a rick roll.

Edit: Here's the text. From the Frontpage link.

Iran: The Unknown Unknown By Alan W. Dowd FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, December 05, 2007 “Here’s what we know,” President George W. Bush began in response to a question about the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. “We know that they’re still trying to learn how to enrich uranium. We know that enriching uranium is an important step in a country who wants to develop a weapon. We know they had a program. We know the program is halted.” If the intelligence is right this time, then this last piece of information is good news. But there’s more to the story, as National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley explained a day earlier. “The intelligence community says they do not know whether Iran currently intends to develop nuclear weapons,” he cautioned, adding, “The risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapons remains a very serious problem.” He then cited the NIE to underscore his point: “Iranian entities are continuing to develop a range of technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons if a decision is made to do so.” In other words, although the clandestine program was apparently halted in 2003, none of America’s 16 intelligence agencies can determine if it’s dead or dormant. “Halted” means paused, and paused means the story is far from over. Indeed, if history is any guide, Iran’s nuclear program is probably as dead as North Korea’s was in the 1990s. Intelligence, it pays to recall, is a mix of science and art, guesswork and facts, gut instinct and calculation. When humans interpret the motives and actions of other humans, we are bound to get it wrong sometimes. All of this calls to mind something Donald Rumsfeld once said, something his critics mocked but something that is profound in its simplicity. “The are known knowns; there are things we know we know,” he explained. “There are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” These are the most worrisome, the things men like Ahmadinejad are hatching, the things that cause intelligence analysts to hedge and presidents to worry, the things that start wars. Predictably, the administration’s critics pounced on the NIE as proof that Washington’s threat of war in the event of Iran’s going nuclear was reckless and unneeded. “They should have stopped the saber rattling; should have never started it,” according to Sen. Barack Obama. Sen. Joe Biden suggested that Bush might be “one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history.” “How could American intelligence agencies have overstated Iran’s intentions…so soon after being reprimanded for making similar errors involving Iraq?” intoned a New York Times piece. Indeed, it pays to recall that NIEs can be wrong. After all, many of these same critics heaped scorn on the Bush administration for accepting the premise of the 2002 NIE, which concluded that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. One wonders why we should be so certain about this NIE, which includes the ominous caveat that “Iran probably would be technically capable of producing enough HEU [highly enriched uranium] for a weapon sometime during the 2010-2015 timeframe.” Plus, it’s worth noting, as Hadley explained, that if this NIE is correct, then it serves to validate the carrot-and-stick approach of the last few years, which has included “intensified international pressure,” “diplomatic isolation,” sanctions, negotiations and the threat of force. In other words, the “saber rattling” Obama so derides may have actually been useful in persuading Iran and thus avoiding war. Perhaps purposely, perhaps by happenstance, Europe and the U.S. had been playing good cop/bad cop with Tehran—one offering the prospect of trade and normalization, the other JDAMs and B-2s. Perhaps the game was working, perhaps not. One thing seems certain: Thanks to the release of this NIE, that game is over. As one Tehran-based analyst told The New York Times, “a military strike by the U.S. might be off the table.” And as Robert Kagan notes, “Fear of American military action was always the primary reason Europeans pressured Tehran. Fear of an imminent Iranian bomb was secondary. Bringing Europeans together in support of serious sanctions was difficult before the NIE. Now it is impossible.” It’s too bad that we have landed in such an unenviable place, but it’s not surprising. Americans want their country’s foreign policy to be guileless yet Machiavellian enough to play off the PRC against the USSR, or to back-channel and bluster the world to the brink and back over Cuba. They want it to be as idealistic as Wilson at Versailles or Carter at Camp David but as hard-nosed as TR during the Perdicaris incident or Reagan at Reykjavik. They want it to be compassionate enough to feed Somalia and protect the Kurds and rebuild Western Europe but cold and calculating enough to ignore Nanking and Cambodia and Eastern Europe. They want their country’s foreign policy to speak softly yet loud enough to call the Soviet Union evil and to condemn apartheid and to denounce the laogai. They want it to wield the big stick—in Dresden and Hiroshima, Korea and Kuwait and Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq—but only in such a way that innocent life is spared. And they want their country’s foreign policy to keep nukes out of places like Iran, while keeping their sons out of harm’s way. To borrow a phrase from Don Rumsfeld, that may depend not on this president’s or his successor’s foreign policy, but rather on an “unknown unknown.” Alan W. Dowd is a senior fellow at Sagamore Institute for Policy Research.

Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: CIA's been duped before... If you're referring to the supposedly non-existant WMD in Iraq, don't buy the MSM's bullshit. There have been nearly 500 chemical and nerve agent munitions found since OIF-I. Did we find the proverbial "Motherload", the Wal-Mart sized warehouse full of 'em? No. But there have indeed been some found. But we wouldn't want facts to get in the way, would we? You mean like the FACT that all we have found are residue and 20 year old leftovers that Iraq had already acknowleded they had lost track of? But hey, we won't get fooled again, right? Yep, those munitions were totally harmless. And since Iraq admitted they "lost track of them" them anyways, what the hell--why not believe them? Munitions such as those DO have a shelf life you know (and it's a little longer than milk).

More on this (another Frontpage link to a symposium)

Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: CIA's been duped before... If you're referring to the supposedly non-existant WMD in Iraq, don't buy the MSM's bullshit. There have been nearly 500 chemical and nerve agent munitions found since OIF-I. Did we find the proverbial "Motherload", the Wal-Mart sized warehouse full of 'em? No. But there have indeed been some found. But we wouldn't want facts to get in the way, would we? You mean like the FACT that all we have found are residue and 20 year old leftovers that Iraq had already acknowleded they had lost track of? But hey, we won't get fooled again, right? Yep, those munitions were totally harmless. And since Iraq admitted they "lost track of them" them anyways, what the hell--why not believe them? Munitions such as those DO have a shelf life you know (and it's a little longer than milk). More on this (another Frontpage link to a symposium)

Good read!