More Dissent On Iran NIE

Two more sources add fuel to the fire of doubt on the Iran NIE. First, Alireza Jafarzadeh, formerly the US spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and author of a book released in January called "The Iran Threat:"

"The weaponization program is alive, is active, and has been resumed since 2004."

"The NIE was only partly right. They (Iranians) were forced to pause in 2003 because of the tremendous pressure they were under," he said. "They suspended it to consider their next steps, and started again in 2004."

Jafarzadeh said he had shared his analysis with contacts in the US intelligence community before the NIE's publication, but suggested a "certain agenda" by some in the community anxious to downplay Iran's threat.

"We've gone back and checked every site that we knew of... since 2002 to see if any of those activities were halted in those sites," he told a press conference, presenting slides purporting to show ongoing nuclear activity.

"With the exception of Lavizan-Shian... no other site was ever shut down."

Second, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger:

The "Key Judgments" released by the intelligence community last week begin with a dramatic assertion: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." This sentence was widely interpreted as a challenge to the Bush administration policy of mobilizing international pressure against alleged Iranian nuclear programs. It was, in fact, qualified by a footnote whose complex phraseology obfuscated that the suspension really applied to only one aspect of the Iranian nuclear weapons program (and not even the most significant one): the construction of warheads. That qualification was not restated in the rest of the document, which continued to refer to the "halt of the weapons program" repeatedly and without qualification.

He goes on to blast the report with respect to the differences between intelligence and policy-making. Specifically, the fact that they shouldn't mix. But, on the greater picture, it is just more evidence -- from two very credible sources -- that the NIE is suspicious at best and deceptive at worst.

There's my two cents.