Here we go again.
Last month, the GOP-run House Intelligence Committee released a report on Iran. The report was not voted on by the full committee.
Its message? "Ooooooh, they’re about to bomb us with a nuke!" It got a LOT of play in the press.
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.
Officials of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency said in a letter that the report contained some "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements."
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Privately, several intelligence officials said the committee report included at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate. Hoekstra’s office said the report was reviewed by the office of John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence.
Negroponte’s spokesman, John Callahan, said in a statement that his office "reviewed the report and provided its response to the committee on July 24, ’06." He did not say whether it had approved or challenged any of the claims about Iran’s capabilities.
"This is like prewar Iraq all over again," said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector who is president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. "You have an Iranian nuclear threat that is spun up, using bad information that’s cherry-picked and a report that trashes the inspectors."
The committee report, written by a single Republican staffer with a hard-line position on Iran, chastised the CIA and other agencies for not providing evidence to back assertions that Iran is building nuclear weapons.
Matt Yglesius reminds us that it was the IAEA who was right when it came to Saddam’s supposed WMDs:
After all the months of debate, lies, hype, more debate, handwringing, warmongering, exaggerations, etc. we came to the moment when IAEA inspectors were back on the ground in Iraq looking into Saddam’s nuclear program. They said there was no nuclear program. They were roundly ignored — the statement simply got no purchase in mainstream media or political circles. The war was on. Months later, everyone was scratching their heads wondering where the WMD were. Years later, people are still debating how the facts were gotten so wrong. The fact remains, though, that before the war, the IAEA was in the country saying the Bush administration was full of shit.
And now the IAEA is saying that the Bush administration is full of shit with respect to Iran. Will they be listened to this time?
UPDATE: Apparently not. Look how the Washington Post treated the two stories: the House Intelligence Committee report (saying that Iran was coming to kill us) got page one treatment a few weeks ago. The response by the UN inspectors (IAEA) today? Page 17.
