Deja Vu
Last month, the House released a report on Iran’s nuclear capabilities, to, in the words of Rep. Hoekstra (R-MI), “help increase the American public’s understanding of Iran as a threat.”
Except that, according to the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran isn’t a nuclear threat.
“Among the [House] committee’s assertions is that Iran is producing weapons-grade uranium at its facility in the town of Natanz. The IAEA called that ‘incorrect,’ noting that weapons-grade uranium is enriched to a level of 90 percent or more. Iran has enriched uranium to 3.5 percent under IAEA monitoring.”
Oh. That would seem to say that Iran is nowhere close to making a nuclear weapon. Why would this seeming discrepancy exist?
The committee report, written by a single Republican staffer with a hard-line position on Iran, chastised the CIA and other agencies for not providing evidence to back assertions that Iran is building nuclear weapons.[...]The report’s author, Fredrick Fleitz, is a onetime CIA officer and special assistant to John R. Bolton, the administration’s former point man on Iran at the State Department.
But doesn’t this have a shocking resemblance to the discredited intelligence before the Iraq war?
“This is like prewar Iraq all over again,” said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector who is president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. “You have an Iranian nuclear threat that is spun up, using bad information that’s cherry-picked and a report that trashes the inspectors.”
I should mention here that Hoekstra was the House member who, along with PA Senator Rick Santorum, “broke” the story about WMDs finally found in Iraq. From the June 23, 2006 NY Times:
The proponents include some members of Congress. Two Republicans, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania held a news conference on Wednesday to announce that, as Mr. Santorum put it, “We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”
American intelligence officials hastily scheduled a background briefing for the news media on Thursday to clarify that. Hoekstra and Mr. Santorum were referring to an Army report that described roughly 500 munitions containing “degraded” mustard or sarin gas, all manufactured before the 1991 gulf war and found scattered through Iraq since 2003.
Such shells had previously been reported and do not change the government conclusion, the officials said.
For the record, “degraded” as it’s used here means ‘not terribly useful in any way.’
Having debunked the “no WMD in Iraq” truth and exposed truth about Iran’s nuclear “capabilities,” what is next for the Michigan representative?
Hoekstra’s committee is working on a separate report about North Korea that is also being written principally by Fleitz. A draft of the report, provided to The Post, includes several assertions about North Korea’s weapons program that the intelligence officials said they cannot substantiate, including one that Pyongyang is already enriching uranium.
All quotes from the Washington Post except the one from the NY Times.
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