US Intelligence Czar John Negroponte splashes cold water on the need to attack Iran - by Robert Parry, TomPaine.com
Negroponte is defying US Administration hardliners who want a worst-case scenario on Iran's capabilities. Instead, he is citing Iran's limited progress in refining uranium and their use of a cascade of only 164 centrifuges. "According to the experts that I consult, achieving -- getting 164 centrifuges to work is still a long way from having the capacity to manufacture sufficient fissile material for a nuclear weapon," Negroponte said in an interview with NBC News on April 20. "Our assessment is that the prospects of an Iranian weapon are still a number of years off, and probably into the next decade," said Negroponte, who was appointed last year as the Director of National Intelligence, a new post that supplanted the traditional primacy of the CIA director as the head of the U.S. intelligence community.Frank J. Gaffney Jr. an original signer of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, even called for Negroponte's firing because of the Iran assessment and his "abysmal personnel decisions" in hiring senior intelligence analysts who were skeptics about Bush's Iraqi WMD claims, too.
In an article for Evangelical Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, Gaffney attacked Negroponte for giving top analytical jobs to Thomas Fingar, who had served as assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, and Kenneth Brill, who was U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which debunked some of the U.S. and British claims about Iraq seeking enriched uranium from Africa. Note EU-Digest: "Iran has presently only been able to enrich uranium up to 4.8%. This quality uranium is required for nuclear power plants. In order to make a nuclear bomb uranium has to be enriched by at least 80%."
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