U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency Chief Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess said, “The bottom line assessments of the [National Intelligence Estimate] still hold true,” Burgess said. “We have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the program.”
Gen. Burgess’s views are even more sanguine than those of retired Israeli Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, who puts an Iranian nuclear warhead at least 7 years out and calls current Israel officials who talk about an Iranian nuke within the year ‘ridiculous,’ asking “where’s the proof?’ Eilam is former director-general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission.
The Times of London reports that Eilam considers the discourse on Iran in Israel ‘hysterical’ and says that it results from the country’s military-industrial complex trying for a bigger budget or attempts by politicians to divert attention from domestic problems.
Bingo!
The US intelligence establishment can’t even see evidence for a nuclear weapon program at all, meaning that the time line is rather longer than 7 years.
Unfortunately, a lot of Burgess’s colleagues, under political pressure, appear ready to cave to the hawks and Neocons on this issue in the next National Intelligence Estimate. Laura Rozen says they will shift to saying Iran may be doing experiments with weapons implications, without saying there is a weapons program, but the military-media complex in the US and Israel will deliberately miss the distinction.
By the way, the assassination by bomb this week of Iranian particle physicist Massoud Ali Mohammadi looks more and more like retaliation against him by hard liners in the regime for his support of the Green protest movement. He was not involved in the nuclear research program in Iran, and there was no obvious reason for an outside power to hit a mere college professor with such a huge bomb.
End/ (Not Continued)
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