New intel chief's defense of controversial NIE raises eyebrows
Tuesday, February 24, 2009 E-Mail this story Free Headline Alerts
Geostrategy-Direct.com
The new Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair continued to support the questionable 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that reported Tehran had halted its nuclear weapon program in 2003.
Blair, as other senior intelligence officials did last year, sought to explain the estimate by stating that the halt in nuclear weapons design and weaponization was only one of three parts to the Iranian program. The other two include uranium enrichment for nuclear weapons fuel and ballistic missile delivery systems for nuclear weapons.
“Iran continues its efforts to develop uranium enrichment technology, which can be used both to produce low-enriched uranium for power reactor fuel and to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons,” he testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Feb. 12.
“As noted, Iran continues to deploy and improve ballistic missiles inherently capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”
U.S. officials who dispute the NIE, say the estimate was based on faulty intelligence deliberately supplied to U.S. intelligence agencies as disinformation. The lead analyst who produced the estimate, Thomas Finger, resigned last year under fire from Congress over the estimate.
Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., told Blair during the hearing that “many of us on this committee criticized the way the 2007 NIE on Iran was drafted, which in the key unclassified judgments left the impression in the public that intelligence community was not concerned about Iran's nuclear efforts.”
Blair replied that he agreed that “we can cause as much harm as good by releasing many of these NIEs on very difficult subjects in which a great deal of secret intelligence which the taxpayers have paid an awful lot of money for us to use to collect secrets are put forth in the wrong way.”
Bond said the estimate and the publication of its key findings “was instrumental in derailing U.S. and European efforts to pressure Iran to shutdown its nuclear program.”
Blair said that the alleged halt since the fall of 2003 did not include “research and development projects with commercial and conventional military applications, some of which would be of limited use for nuclear weapons” sine 2003.
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