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Clapper: Iran Still Not Building a Nuclear Weapon; Purpose of Sanctions is to Foster Unrest

By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | April 18, 2013

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee today and reiterated the same assessment regarding Iran as was delivered in March 2013.

The exact same statements – verbatim – were included in Clapper’s unclassified report, including the assessment that “Iran is developing nuclear capabilities to enhance its security, prestige, and regional influence and give it the ability to develop nuclear weapons, should a decision be made to do so. We do not know if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.”

Of course, as Clapper notes, Iran’s ability to potentially manufacture the components is inherent to its advanced nuclear infrastructure and is not an indication of an active nuclear weapons program, which all U.S. intelligence agencies agree Iran does not have.

As such, Clapper again reported to the Senate Committee, “Iran has the scientific, technical, and industrial capacity to eventually produce nuclear weapons. This makes the central issue its political will to do so.”

In his testimony, Clapper stated that, were the decision to weaponize its nuclear energy program to be made by Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran could theoretically reach a “breakout” point within “months, not years.” His report repeats the assessment, though, that “[d]espite this progress, we assess Iran could not divert safeguarded material and produce a weapon-worth of WGU before this activity is discovered.”

Again, undermining the bogus claims that Iran is an irrational and reckless actor, Clapper maintained the judgment that “Iran’s nuclear decision making is guided by a cost-benefit approach,” balancing its own domestic interests with “the international political and security environment.”  Iran also has a defensive – not aggressive – military posture, one based on “its strategy to deter – and if necessary retaliate against – forces in the region, including US forces” were an attack on Iran to occur.

During questioning from Senators following his prepared remarks, Clapper admitted – as a number of recent independent reports have shown – that the increasingly harsh sanctions levied upon Iran have had no effect on the decision-making process of the Iranian leadership, yet have produced considerable damage to the Iranian economy and resulted in increased “inflation, unemployment, [and the] unavailability of commodities” for the Iranian people.

This, he said, is entirely the point.  Responding to Maine Senator Angus King, who asked about the impact sanctions have on the Iranian government, Clapper explained that the intent of sanctions is to spark dissent and unrest in the Iranian population, effectively starting that Obama administration’s continued collective punishment of the Iranian people is a deliberate (and embarrassingly futile) tactic employed to foment regime change.

“What they do worry about though is sufficient restiveness in the street that would actually jeopardize the regime. I think they are concerned about that,” Clapper said of the Iranian leadership.  It is no wonder, then, why Clapper refers in his own official report to the economic warfare waged against Iran as “regime threatening sanctions.”

Not mentioned in the session, of course, are the decades of repeated affirmations by senior Iranian officials that Iran rejects nuclear weapons on strategic, moral and religious grounds.  Within the past six weeks, this position has been reiterated by Iran’s envoy to the IAEA Ali Asghar Soltanieh, President Ahmadinejad, and Ayatollah Khamenei himself.

Just two days ago, for instance, during a three-day diplomatic visit to Africa, Ahmadinejad declared, “The era of the atomic bomb is over. Atomic bombs are no longer useful and have no effect on political equations. Atomic bombs belong to the last century, and anyone who thinks he can rule the world by atomic bombs is a political fool,” according to a report by Iran’s state-run PressTV. He also pushed back the constant conflation in Western discourse of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons. “Nuclear energy is one thing and an atomic bomb is another. This useful energy must belong to all nations,” he stated.

Furthermore, reports that Iran has continued converting its stockpiled 19.75% enriched uranium into fuel plates for its cancer-treating medical research reactor gained absolutely no traction within the Committee or Clapper’s comments. For Congress, Iran is a threat simply by virtue of having independent political considerations, inalienable national rights and refusing to accept American hegemony over its own security interests.

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who spends most of his time advocating for new, illegal military adventures in the Middle East, presented this wholly disingenuous and misleading question to Clapper: “Over the last six months, as we’ve been imposing sanctions and been negotiating with the P5+1 regime, [does Iran] have more or less enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb?”

None of Iran’s enriched uranium is “for a nuclear bomb” insofar as it is all far from weapons-grade and under the safeguard and seal of the IAEA. Iran’s enriched uranium is no more “for a nuclear bomb” than Graham’s fanciest set of steak knives are for throat-slitting.

“Can I just say it’s more?,” Graham proffered, revealing that he already knew the answer he wanted to hear, at which point Clapper chimed in. “Not highly-enriched,” he said, “but up to the 20% level.” Graham was undeterred from his propagandizing and grandstanding. “Well, they’re marching in the wrong direction,” he said. “We talk, they enrich.” AIPAC poetry at its finest.

Shortly before ending the session, in response to questions from Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, Clapper stated that the relationship between the American and Israeli intelligence communities – especially on the Iranian nuclear program – has “never been closer or more pervasive,” citing unprecedented levels of “intimacy.”

While each state continues to maintain its own unique sources for intelligence gathering, Clapper said, “generally speaking,” the United States and Israel are “on the same page” when it comes to Iran.

Pressing the issue on behalf of his AIPAC backers, Blumenthal asked whether all information is shared between the two nuclear-armed nations, at which point Clapper declined to agree completely.

“Pretty much,” he replied.

Why was Clapper being so cagey?  An Associated Press report from last July seems to provide an answer:

Despite inarguable ties between the U.S. and its closest ally in the Middle East and despite statements from U.S. politicians trumpeting the friendship, U.S. national security officials consider Israel to be, at times, a frustrating ally and a genuine counterintelligence threat.

In fact, the AP states, “The CIA considers Israel its No. 1 counterintelligence threat” in the Middle East, meaning that the agency “believes that U.S. national secrets are safer from other Middle Eastern governments than from Israel.” This is unsurprising, of course, as “Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, and its FBI equivalent, the Shin Bet, both considered among the best in the world, have been suspected of recruiting U.S. officials and trying to steal American secrets.”

Did any of that make it into Clapper’s “Worldwide Threat Assessment” today? No, of course not. Israel was only mentioned as a victim and an ally. One might think an untrustworthy, nuclear-armed serial aggressor, constantly threatening to drag the United States into an unprovoked military conflict with inevitable devastating consequences, all with the allegiance and blessing of Congress, would rank rather high on potential security threats to the United States.

But James Clapper isn’t allowed to say that.

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April 18, 2013 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

NATO commander reveals plans for intervention in Syria

Press TV – March 20, 2013

NATO’s supreme commander says the alliance is drawing up contingency plans for a possible military intervention in Syria.

Admiral James Stavridis, commander of US European Command, said at the Senate Armed Services Committee that US military would be ready to take part in the aggression, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

Stavridis also serves as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).

The United States is “looking at a variety of operations. We are prepared if called upon to be engaged,” he said.

The US commander said the 28-member military alliance is also looking into the option of assisting the foreign-backed militants fighting against the Syrian government.

Stavridis further added that the negotiations within the NATO member states also concentrated on imposing a no-fly zone over Syria and providing lethal support to the militants.

The official confirmed that targeting Syria’s air defenses would also be taken into consideration.

On March 18, US Secretary of State John Kerry said Washington would not ‘stand in the way’ of Europeans if they decide to arm the militants fighting against the Syrian government.

The Los Angeles Times reported on March 16 that the CIA is considering a secret contingency plan to expand the US assassination drone strikes to Syria, according to former and current US officials.

The US publicly claims that its role in Syria is merely limited to providing food and medical supplies to the anti-government militants, but the Croatian daily Jutarnji List revealed on March 7 that the US has coordinated shipments of weapons from Croatia to the militants in Syria.

The report said 3,000 tons of weapons in 75 planeloads have been transferred from Zagreb to the militants in Syria via Jordan and Turkey. The weapons were reportedly paid for by Saudi Arabia at the request of the US.

March 20, 2013 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Not-So-Imminent Iranian Nuke: A Year Away for a Decade

By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | March 18, 2013


According to official estimates, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now roughly a year away from acquiring a nuclear bomb.  Well, that is, if it were actually building a nuclear bomb.  Which it’s not.

“Right now, we think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon, but obviously we don’t want to cut it too close,” President Barack Obama told an Israeli television station on March 14, 2013.  In order to stop Iran, Obama vowed to “continue to keep all options on the table,” a euphemism for engaging in an unprovoked military attack, thus initiating a war of aggression, the “supreme international crime.”

Obama’s statement came just two days after his own Director of National Intelligence told a Senate committee that the Iranian government had not made a decision to weaponize its legal, safeguarded civilian nuclear energy program.  “We do not know if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons,” DNI James Clapper said.  Even if it did, he added, Iran wouldn’t be able to secretly divert any of its stockpiled and safeguarded enrichment uranium to a weapons program.

The American president failed to make this distinction in his interview, instead saying only that a nuclear-armed Iran would be “dangerous for the world. It would be dangerous for U.S. national security interests.”

Repeating his administration’s main talking point, Obama told his Israeli interviewer, “What I have also said is that there is a window, not an infinite period of time, but a window of time where we can resolve this diplomatically and it is in all of our interests.”

But this window has already been open for decades and Iran has supposedly been only a year away from a bomb for the past ten years.

In November 2003, then Mossad chief Meir Dagan told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Iran’s nuclear program would be at a “point of no return” within the next year and would then “have the potential to produce 10 nuclear bombs a year.” Israeli Defense Minster Shaul Mofaz repeated the one year “point of no return” timeline in early 2005, a claim reinforced by other Israeli officials throughout that year.

Similar estimates were made in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Oh, and 2009.

In April 2010, Ronald Burgess, director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the “general consensus” was that Iran could develop a single nuclear bomb within a year if the leadership decided to do so, despite maintaining that Iran didn’t have an active nuclear weapons program.

As the years have passed, this assessment has held fast.

In late January 2011, Aviv Kochavi, director of Israeli Military Intelligence, admitted Iran was not actively working on a nuclear weapon, but claimed it could build one in “a year or two” once “the leader decides to begin enriching at 90 percent.”

A year later, in January 2012, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told 60 Minutes, “The consensus is that, if they decided to do it, it would probably take them about a year to be able to produce a bomb.”

Just few days later, Kochavi told a panel at the Herzliya security conference that “Iran has enough nuclear material for four bombs,” adding, “We have conclusive evidence that they are after nuclear weapons. When Khamenei gives the order to produce the first nuclear weapon – it will be done, we believe, within one year.”

Last week, addressing the very same conference, Kochavi was back with a new prediction – actually, it was the same one as before.  He claimed that, in the coming year, the Iranian “leadership would like to find itself in the position of being able to break out to an atomic weapon stage in a short period of time, according to the IDF’s intelligence assessments. However, he said that Iran has not yet decided to build the bomb.”

Greg Thielmann, a former U.S. intelligence analyst now with the Arms Control Association, recently explained that “calculating such a time line involves a complicated set of likely and unlikely assumptions,” telling journalist Laura Rozen, “If Iran decided today to build nuclear weapons, it would require years, not weeks or months, to deploy a credible nuclear arsenal.”

Meanwhile, with Obama set to visit Israel this week, Reuters now notes that “Netanyahu has not publicly revised the spring-to-summer 2013 dating for his ‘red line’,” the stated point at which the Iranian nuclear program advances far enough to automatically trigger an Israeli attack, a threat laid down by the Israeli Prime Minister last September.  “But several Israeli officials privately acknowledged it had been deferred, maybe indefinitely,” Reuters adds before quoting an anonymous official: “The red line was never a deadline,” he said.

Clearly, when it comes to propagandistic prognostications about the imminence of an Iranian bomb, they never really are.

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March 19, 2013 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | 1 Comment