Submitted by MB, Dec 3, 2007 14:24

It's interesting that this report came out a year ago, but the White House prevented it's release while all that time we had Cheney and Bush beating the drums once again for war.

The intelligence community's 2005 assessment concluded, inaccurately, that "Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons" and "could produce enough fissile material for a weapon by the end of this decade." But as the new NIE finds, Iran is unlikely to achieve this capability until after 2015 "because of foreseeable technical and programmatic problems."

This new NIE is long overdue. It was reportedly completed a year ago, but blocked by the White House. IPS reported:

A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran.

the White House's manipulation of the Iran NIE bore a striking resemblance to the controversies that played out over pre-war Iraq intelligence.

But even with Cheney's meddling, this NIE makes it clear that there is no imminent danger from Iran's nuclear program.

Maybe instead of spending time on who we can invade, bomb or sanction, we can figure out how to rebuild New Orleans, feed our hungry, house our poor, bring in new jobs with renewable energy as our focus, and start educating our youth, let's spend half of what we do on weapons towards education, we wouldn't need the weapons.

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