Iran: Lies, Lies, Lies
Last night on the BBC’s Question Time, panelist Simon Sebag Montefiore quite calmly lied through his teeth that Iran is an energy rich country that has no need for nuclear power. That would explain why Iran needs to import petrol from Russia to meet its needs.
Others blatantly lying in the last day or two were:
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who wrote an op-ed in yesterday’s Finanical Times, saying: “There are three key elements to a nuclear weapon - the fissile material, the missile itself, and the process of weaponising the fissile material for the missile. The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program published this week suggested that Iran has put on hold work on the last of these elements. If so, good. But Iran is still pursuing the other two elements, in particular, an enrichment program that has no apparent civilian application, but which could produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon, despite demands to stop from the United Nations Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency.”
American Israel Public Affairs Committee spokesman Josh Block told the Jewish Telegragh Agency that, if anything, the NIE showed that Iran had advanced further than was publicly known, claiming that “Iran has utilized and has at its disposal a hidden, second unacknowledged, unmonitored track for enriching bomb fuel; and has engaged in a nuclear weaponization program, an assessment never before made public by the American intelligence community.”
Also, on the 4th Dec., the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations held an emergency conference call to discuss the NIE and a strategy to get the next round of sanctions imposed on Iran, calling the NIE a “challenge.” They propose emphasizing that Iran still backs terrorism.
Gerald Steinberg of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs wrote that Israeli analysts have long warned their U.S. counterparts about the potential for a parallel “black” Iranian weapons program based on a small nuclear reactor producing plutonium, and following the North Korean model. “Indeed, Iran is known to be constructing just such a reactor at Arak, leaving room for another undetected facility.”
Former notorious U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton wrote an op-ed published Washington Post yesterday, accusing U.S. intelligence officials of “engaging in policy formulation rather than `intelligence’ analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it.” He lectures President Bush to “leave a lasting legacy by returning the intelligence world to its proper function.”
In the meantime, Dick Cheney admitted that the NIE was released because “it was not likely to stay classified for long anyway…. Everything leaks,” in an interview with Politico published yesterday.