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Saturday, December 8, 2007

FROM JOSEPH FARAH'S G2 BULLETIN
Did Iran really halt nukes?
Analysts suspect ploy to stop Bush action against Tehran

Posted: December 8, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

The following report is excerpted from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, the premium online newsletter published by the founder of WND. Subscriptions are $99 a year or, for monthly trials, just $9.95 per month for credit card users, and provide instant access for the complete reports.

© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

Serious doubts loom over the recent National Intelligence Estimate concluding Iran's nuclear weapons development stopped in 2003, reports Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

Leading analysts point out the assessment does not take into account years of nuclear assistance Iran received from Russia, the Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan and North Korea, from whom it also obtained considerable assistance in missile development.

"If this NIE is true, the evidence would have to be awfully good," said Michael Ledeen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. "And evidence of that quality has been in famously short supply."

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Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, formerly chief of the West European division in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, offered a scathing critique.

"If you don't know the sources of information and their reliability that led to the Key Judgments, you don't know anything … ," Clarridge declared. "Because those involved with the NIE know BEEP well that their sources, if they exist, will never be revealed, they are saying 'trust us in our Judgments because we know the sources.'"

Clarridge said that with the intelligence community's "abominable analytical track record over the last 15 years and the well known lack of reliable human and signal sources available to them," no reasonable person "would accept their assurances, particularly when you look at the political partisan and under-educated group that makes up the NIE staff."

Veteran journalist Norman Podhoretz, a foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, pointed out that two year ago the intelligence community was sure Iran was determined to build a nuclear arsenal.

"Why then should we believe it when it now tells us, and with the same 'high confidence,' that Iran had already called a halt to its nuclear-weapons program in 2003?" he asked.

"But I entertain an even darker suspicion," he added. "It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the president may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations."

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