U.S. spy agencies are considering whether to rewrite a controversial 2007 intelligence report that asserted Tehran halted its efforts to build nuclear weapons in 2003, current and former U.S. intelligence officials say.
| Mostly because Tehran never did halt the process. It's not an effort when a stepwise progression is proceeding as originally planned. |
The intelligence agencies' rethink comes as pressure is mounting on Capitol Hill, and among U.S. allies, for the Obama administration to redo the 2007 assessment, after a string of recent revelations about Tehran's nuclear program. German, French and British intelligence agencies have all disputed the conclusions of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, in recent months, according to European officials briefed on the exchanges.
Rewriting an NIE is a major undertaking because it is the most comprehensive of U.S. intelligence reports and reflects the combined judgment of all 16 American intelligence bodies.
| The poor darlings actually have to do their jobs, fixing what they deliberately did wrong before. |
The 2007 report created a political headache for the Bush administration when Republicans and some allied governments such as Israel criticized the broad public conclusion that Iran was backing off its nuclear ambitions. The report reversed earlier findings that Iran was pursuing a nuclear-weapons program. It found with "high confidence" that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, and with "moderate confidence" that it hadn't been restarted as of mid-2007.
| Everyone involved in that little project should be fired for either stupidity or malfeasance -- and get to make their own choice. |
So far, intelligence officials are not "ready to declare that invalid," a senior U.S. intelligence official said, emphasizing that the judgment covered the 2003-2007 time frame only. That leaves room for a reassessment of the period since the December 2007 report was completed, the official suggested.
| If I close my eyes, you can't see me. |
A shift in the U.S. intelligence community's official stance -- concluding Iran restarted its nuclear weapons work or that Iran's ambitions have ramped up -- could significantly affect President Barack Obama's efforts to use diplomacy to contain Tehran's capabilities. Any timeline for negotiations could be shortened if a new NIE concludes Tehran has restarted its atomic-weapons work, said officials involved in the diplomacy.
| Since negotiations have been going on for about three years too long, stopping now is the right idea. |
But the White House could also use the new report to galvanize wider international support for sanctions against Tehran.
"At some point in the near future, our analytic community is going to want to press the reset button on our judgments on intent and weaponization in light of Qom and other information we're receiving," the senior intelligence official said, referring to Mr. Obama's recent revelation that Tehran was secretly assembling a uranium-enrichment facility at a military base outside the holy city of Qom.
| This is where we point and laugh. |
"Countries would no longer be able to hide behind the NIE," said a European official working on Iran.
Germany's intelligence service, the BND, publicly challenged the U.S. NIE by disclosing information during a court case this year that pointed to ongoing Iranian nuclear-weapons work. The BND gave specifics on Iranian purchases of high-speed cameras and radiation detectors that could be used in testing atomic detonations. A working paper composed by the IAEA, meanwhile, detailed evidence that Iran was continuing to experiment with nuclear warhead designs, according to people who have viewed it.
"The U.S. is being directly challenged by its closest allies" on Iran's weapons work, said David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who heads Washington's Institute for Science and International Security and has viewed portions of the IAEA paper.
| "Lead, follow, or get out of the way," they are saying to President Obama, oh so diplomatically. |
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