New York Times News
Lest we forget Iran, page A1 of the New York Times today graces us with apprehension: U.S. Faces a Tricky Task in Assessment of Data on Iran. But it’s a whole whole lot of nothing for two pages till it ends on this:
The draft version [of the U.S. government’s National Intelligence Estimate of 2010] had concluded that the Iranians were still trying to build a bomb, the same finding of a 2005 assessment. But as they scrutinized the new intelligence from several sources, including intercepted communications in which Iranian officials were heard complaining to one another about stopping the program, the American intelligence officials decided they had to change course, officials said. While enrichment activities continued, the evidence that Iran had halted its weapons program in 2003 at the direction of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was too strong to ignore, they said.
One former senior official characterized the information as very persuasive. “I had high confidence in it,” he said. “There was tremendous evidence that the program had been halted.”
And today, despite criticism of that assessment from some outside observers and hawkish politicians, American intelligence analysts still believe that the Iranians have not gotten the go-ahead from Ayatollah Khamenei to revive the program.
“That assessment,” said one American official, “holds up really well.”
What a waste of a front page, when important stories often land on A18.
RE: “page A1 of the New York Times today graces us with apprehension: U.S. Faces a Tricky Task in Assessment of Data on Iran. But it’s a whole whole lot of nothing for two pages…” ~ Annie Robbins
MY COMMENT: Numerous articles by James Risen over the years in the New York Times have hyped the threat from Iran. This has convinced me that he essentially acts as a propagandist for Israel. The same goes for George Jahn* of The Associated Press (AP).
* SEE: How Mossad Justified Its Murder of an Innocent Iranian Electrical Engineer, by Gareth Porter, TruthOut.org, 3/17/12
ENTIRE ARTICLE – http://www.truth-out.org/how-mossad-justified-its-murder-innocent-iranian-electrical-engineer/1331747276
The expression is burying the “lede.” Not “lead.”
Note that many papers carry NYT front page stories but only run the first 1/3 – 1/2 of the story. The paper can legitimately claim they told the whole story but people who read the story in syndication by other papers will not get the whole story at all irrespective of how diligently they read it. This appears to be a common practice and is why I never read NYT stories in other papers, e.g. The Denver Post.
This is extreme even by NYT practices. Before seeing annie’s comments I read that piece and was wondering what was the point and then, right at the end, there was the news. And, at least to me, that was something new — total inversion of news reporting protocols.
Regime change has been US policy in Iran for a long time, well before any nuclear issues arose, the Iraq war was concocted on the basis, as Wolfowitz said at the time that WMD was the one thing the US and UK could agree on so they ran with that. The US will not take yes for an answer on this one, unfortunately for US/Israel, Iran is not the pushover Iraq seemed to be, they can cause major problems for the coalition of the willing. I have to agree with former British Foreign Minister Jack Straw who said in a debate in 2006, that the idea of an attack on Iran was “completely nuts”.