The Daily Background

Okay, so Sy hersh has a new article out in The New Yorker. The topic? Like all of Hersh’s articles lately, it’s about Iran. It’s titled “The Next Act:
Is a damaged Administration less likely to attack Iran, or more?“

Among other things, the article (which I have read… okay skimmed, although it is quite long) reveals that a secret CIA assessment has concluded that there is zero evidence that Iran is working on nuclear weapons. Writes Hersh:

The Administration’s planning for a military attack on Iran was made far more complicated earlier this fall by a highly classified draft assessment by the C.I.A. challenging the White House’s assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb. The C.I.A. found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency. (The C.I.A. declined to comment on this story.)

Hersh adds– importantly– that the White House was ‘hostile’ towards conclusions of the CIA report. Apparently some neo-cons justify bombing Iran as part of a larger attempt to prove the validity of pre-emptive warfare (the idea that a country can strike another before it strikes it first, like the US did with Iraq). Hersh continues, writing:

The C.I.A. assessment warned the White House that it would be a mistake to conclude that the failure to find a secret nuclear-weapons program in Iran merely meant that the Iranians had done a good job of hiding it.

[…]
But some in the White House, including in Cheney’s office, had made just such an assumption—that “the lack of evidence means they must have it,” the former official said.

Hersh also notes that some in the CIA are warning that an attack on Iran might unify the middle east at large into an ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ situation. It might even bring an unlikely end to sectarian violence to Iraq, for that matter.

The former senior intelligence official added that the C.I.A. assessment raised the possibility that an American attack on Iran could end up serving as a rallying point to unite Sunni and Shiite populations. “An American attack will paper over any differences in the Arab world, and we’ll have Syrians, Iranians, Hamas, and Hezbollah fighting against us—and the Saudis and the Egyptians questioning their ties to the West.

Hersh also writes that Israeli intelligence claims to have proof that the Iranian government is working on a trigger device for nuclear weapons. “The problem is that no one can verify it,” one intelligence expert told Hersh. The Israeli government has consistently been the most trigger-eager of pretty much all US allies, and certainly of those in the middle east. The intelligence expert continued:

“We don’t know who the Israeli source is. The briefing says the Iranians are testing trigger mechanisms”—simulating a zero-yield nuclear explosion without any weapons-grade materials—“but there are no diagrams, no significant facts. Where is the test site? How often have they done it? How big is the warhead—a breadbox or a refrigerator? They don’t have that.” And yet, he said, the report was being used by White House hawks within the Administration to “prove the White House’s theory that the Iranians are on track. And tests leave no radioactive track, which is why we can’t find it.” Still, he said, “The agency is standing its ground.”

Indeed, as Hersh points out and as immediately jumped to my mind upon reading this, there was unconfirmable human intelligence such as this which partially mislead us into Iraq in the first place (cough, cough, Curveball).

Filed under: Iran Related, Z-TDB Blog