Personal Intelligence Agency Alert

A new PIA Alert was triggered by The Telegraph's Sean Rayment, who wrote the following in this breathless piece about the inevitability of military action against Iran:

The International Atomic Energy Authority, the nuclear watchdog, believes that much of Iran's programme is now devoted to uranium enrichment and plutonium separation, technologies that could provide material for nuclear bombs to be developed in the next three years.

We know the U.S. intelligence community's current estimate is that Iran is about a decade away from the ability to produce a nuclear weapon. Even ultra-hawks in the Israeli military community concede that Iran is at least three to five years away. Thus, The Telegraph's Sean Rayment appears to have his own Personal Intelligence Agency, the information from which has caused him to reach a radically different conclusion than the large and well-funded U.S. intelligence community that includes the CIA, DIA and NSA.

Did you note how Rayment's wording makes it appear as if the IAEA believes that Iran could develop a bomb within three years?

The marketing of Target Iran continues to gather strength from lazy speculation, sloppy reporting, casually repeated misstatements, and agenda-driven mendacity.