"In fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."
With those nine much-argued words, the American intelligence community abruptly cut the ground from beneath years of threats to bomb or invade Iran if it did not do what the NIC concluded "with high confidence" that it had already done. In the pained bleat of denial that predictably followed from the White House and its allies, a basic question got pushed to the back of the line: Who pressed to declassify these highly inconvenient findings?
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The fact that the NIE says what it says, and its release, both show that the White House has lost control over American intelligence. This good news probably needs a lot of hedging and qualification, but it is good all the same.
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Absent a big surprise or sudden turn in the road, the president's attempt to remake the Middle East leaves an Iraq with a Shiite government in friendly concert with a Shiite Iran whose leader speaks with a new confidence as he brushes aside American threats not to "allow" or not to "tolerate" -- words used by Cheney and Bush -- a bomb program, which American intelligence says was abandoned four years ago.
The White House ordered a stepped-up effort [to encourage defectors] in hopes of gathering stronger evidence that Tehran was making progress toward building a nuclear bomb. The Bush administration "wanted better information" on Iran's nuclear programs, said a US official briefed on the expanded collection efforts.
"I can't imagine that they would have ever guessed that the information they got would show that the program was shut down," the official said.
