Sunday, April 02, 2006

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.

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I was just in Iran and visited their Ayatollah Khomeni Center for the Devotion to Building an Atom Bomb (or AKCDBAB...which makes more sense if you think of it as an Arabic acronym)

They had some nice pieces on display that confirm the Bush Administration's fears. I'll post some of my tourist pictures as soon as the nice man at the police station mails me my camera as he promised.

KPA

4/02/2006 10:42 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's theoretically possible that he's referring to the IAEA's estimate (though I doubt it), or looking at the timescales one might generally expect for such technological direction. So he doesn't have to have a PIA.

But if he doesn't, he's guilty of bad journalism. So this gets him little further.

4/02/2006 6:45 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Cue the cutsy TV news graphic and theme music......

4/03/2006 10:01 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

from Hans BLix today: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060403/ap_on_re_eu/iran_blix

4/03/2006 2:36 PM  
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4/23/2007 12:53 PM  

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