The UN is a little late to the "House intel report on Iran is ridiculous" party, but a hearty welcome anyway. The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) publicly disputed much of the report, and did so vociferously.
U.N. inspectors investigating Iran's nuclear program angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran's capabilities, calling parts of the document "outrageous and dishonest" and offering evidence to refute its central claims.And just for those keeping score at home, this is from AMERICABlog over three weeks ago:
The House intel committee is right to say that we don't have enough information on Iran, but analysts have to work with what they have, not politicized conjecture. There's a difference between connecting and explaining the dots and creating new ones to reach a preordained conclusion [...] The bottom line is, it's not that analysts are trying to downplay the threat of Iran . . . it's that the threat doesn't meet the "SCARY!" threshold that these Republicans are hoping for.As a fun little add-on, the end of the article indicates that the author of the Iran report (Fredrick Fleitz, a onetime CIA officer and lackey of Ambassador Bolton) is currently working on a report on North Korea. I can hardly wait.
