Skip to main content

Iran: Sabre rattling and the reality

Some would say that one ought to be cautious about accepting any report from Iran's PressTV, but as it is reporting AP and referring to a piece in The New York Times, one would hope that what it is being reported here is accurate.   If so, the sabre rattling from certain quarters directed at Iran - plus the sanctions imposed on the country - may well be totally displaced.

"The Associated Press report said Sunday that although Israeli leaders have been charging for years that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons, their officials have accepted the more nuanced American view.

The US Intelligence Community has said in frequent reports, the latest of which was published in February, that there is no hard evidence showing Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb.

The report added that several senior Israeli officials, who spoke to AP in recent days clearly, said Israel has come around to the US view that no final decision to build a bomb has been made by Iran.

The officials, who are privy to Israeli intelligence, added that this is the prevailing view in the Israeli intelligence community.

On March 18, The New York Times published a report quoting a former top US intelligence official as saying that both Washington and Tel Aviv have reached a consensus over the peaceful nature of Tehran’s nuclear energy program.

“There is not a lot of dispute between the US and Israeli intelligence communities on the fact” that Iran has not deviated from its nuclear energy program.

The Los Angeles Times reported on February 23rd that 16 US intelligence agencies agree Tehran was not seeking to build nuclear weapons.

The “highly classified” intelligence assessment was reportedly circulated among US policymakers early last year.

The US and Israel have been escalating their war rhetoric against Iran in recent months, claiming that there are diversions in the country’s nuclear energy program towards a military one."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...
6 comments
Read more