Did the CIA 'Cook the Books' on Iran?

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Thanks to a brilliant piece of journalism by German investigative reporter Bruno Schirra published in the July 20 edition of The Wall Street Journal Europe, we have evidence to suggest that the 2007 NIE's conclusion about Iran's nuclear bomb program [having been halted] wasn't merely wrong, but corrupt.

Simply put, while our country's intelligence service believed that Iran had abandoned its nuclear bomb program in 2003, Germany's intelligence service was amassing evidence that the Iranian bomb program was ongoing. This raises three obvious and crucially important questions:

• Was our country's intelligence service aware of the BND's evidence and conclusions when its analysts wrote that 2007 NIE about Iran?
• If not, why not?
• If our intelligence service was aware of the BND's evidence and conclusions, then how and why did the authors of that 2007 NIE reach the opposite conclusion about Iran's nuclear bomb program?

It is inconceivable to me that senior officials of our intelligence service were unaware of the BND's evidence and conclusions about Iran's nuclear bomb program. On the other hand, if our intelligence officials were aware of the BND's evidence and conclusions, why did we reach the opposite conclusion?

Did they just ignore the BND's evidence because they didn't like it and because our intelligence officials wanted to throw a banana peel under President Bush's feet?

A nuclear-armed Iran threatens our national survival, and that to meet this threat President Obama and his advisers need the best possible intelligence. Only the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees can get to the bottom of all this. But right now leading members of these committees, and the Speaker of the House, are blathering on -- and on -- about the phony issue of whether former Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to not testify about some program to wipe out the leaders of al Qaeda that never actually got off the ground.

This isn't politics; this is suicide. God help us if our enemies conclude that the United States is no longer capable of being serious about intelligence.

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image toon gwot nsec = Oby's sand castles v Iran NKorea's rockets