America's On-Again, Off-Again Love Affair with Iran's Nuclear Program

America's On-Again, Off-Again Love Affair with Iran's Nuclear Program

By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett
The Race For Iran
June 8, 2011

Seymour Hersh, the acclaimed journalist who, in 1970, won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and has subsequently broken many other important stories dealing with America’s foreign and national security policies (e.g., prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib), has published his most recent article, on U.S. intelligence assessments of Iran’s nuclear activities, in The New Yorker. The piece focuses, in particular, on the 2011 updated National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian nuclear program.

The story merits reading in its entirety, but we will highlight the bottom line here. According to Hersh’s sources—who include current and former U.S. government officials with access to the updated NIE in various stages of its preparation—the document, “representing the best judgment of the senior officers from all the major American intelligence agencies”, comes to the same conclusion as its 2007 predecessor does—namely, that “there is no conclusive evidence that Iran has made any effort to build the bomb since 2003.”

Continued. . .