Keystone Kondi Rice is back in the news. This time she's helping her boss make boo noise about what the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) calls Iran's "relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons."

On January 8, speaking at an AIPAC conference, Condi said that the Iranians, "continue to inch closer to a nuclear weapon." This despite the November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate finding (.pdf here) that stated, "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."

Condi and AIPAC and the rest of the neoconservative universe have treated the November NIE the way it treats all inconvenient facts; they've ignored it. And once again, the mainstream media, most notably the New York Times, have been their willing partner in crime.

The present administration, as we all know, have done a totally distructive job in the policies it has set forth, with the help of those in congress that fall under the same political umbrella, or at least say they are, Republican and Conservative, as they tried to set about to enforce an Imperialist Presidency!

Daniella Zalcman (cc)

If an intelligence officer brought me a report that read like the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, he'd be picking it out of his next morning's constitutional. That NIE was one of the worst compendiums of unsupported summary judgment statements I've ever seen. Good golly; Charles Krauthammer supports his opinions better than that.

I made the sound of one jaw dropping Monday when National Security Adviser Steven Hadley said that the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran "suggests that the President has the right strategy."

One might assume that that is a silly rhetorical question after all Pakistan built its nuclear weapons on their own didn't they? Perhaps. But, where did the technical knowledge and equipment come from giving Pakistani scientists the ability to create the Islamic bomb. As they call it. A speech given by President Dwight D. Eisenhower at United Natons on December 8, 1953 called Atoms for Peace in which he laid a vision for the peaceful uses for atomic energy might be a good starting point as discussed in an article by Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz which appeared in the November 29, 2007 issue of the Asia Times.