March 05, 2007	Monday	Safar 15, 1428

WASHINGTON, March 4: New doubts are being expressed in Washington about the accuracy of US intelligence on Iran’s nuclear programme, days after CIA officials acknowledged they blundered while assessing North Korea’s nuclear capability.

The big question concerning Iran is just how close Tehran is to having a nuclear weapon. Some US officials say that Iran is still 5-10 years away from making a bomb.

But critics say that there are at least three reasons that make them doubt such assertions”

The US lacks human intelligence from inside Iran which is essential for an accurate assessment.

US intelligence has been critically wrong before too, particularly on Iraq which the United States said was close to making nuclear bomb before the 2003 invasion.

Since the invasion, US officials have admitted that Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons programme.

It is still unproven whether Iran is using the cover of a nuclear power plant programme to try to make atomic weapons.

Several senior diplomats familiar with the nuclear scene say that while US intelligence helped reveal Iran's secret nuclear programme in 2002, none of the information they provided to the International Atomic Energy Agency since then had led to meaningful leads.

Despite these uncertainties about Iran’s nuclear programme, the US standoff with Iran remains tense. The Bush administration says it won't rule out a military strike if Tehran refuses to end its nuclear enrichment programme.

Earlier this week, the Bush administration backed away from claims that North Korea has an active uranium-enrichment programme, reversing the stance US intelligence officials have taken since 2002.

"We still don't have the intelligence community (needed) to give us as policy-makers the information we need to make good decisions on North Korea and Iran and other places," said Congressman Pter Hoekstra, R-Holland, during an appearance on "Fox News Sunday."

The Los Angeles Times points out that the intelligence failure sounds too familiar to the run-up to the Iraq war: For "the second time, serious questions have been raised about the credibility of US assessments of the potential nuclear threat posed by an enemy nation. Are these charges justified?” the newspaper asks.

In a report to Congress in November 2002, the Central Intelligence Agency claimed that North Korea was pursuing a parallel uranium enrichment programme capable of providing the raw material for two or more nuclear weapons a year, starting "mid-decade".

That prompted the suspension of US oil supplies to Pyongyang. North Korea responded by throwing out international weapons inspectors and up its plutonium bomb programme.

On Tuesday, a veteran intelligence official called Joseph DeTrani told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that the government's certainty about the programme's existence was only at "the mid-confidence level", which means the information was not fully corroborated and some officials held other views.

On Wednesday, the Director of National Intelligence declassified a report on North Korea which stated: "The degree of progress towards producing enriched uranium remains unknown."

Non-government weapons experts see such statements as the beginning of a full retraction and an admission that the CIA and other agencies jumped to conclusions based on insufficient evidence.

"The evidence doesn't support the extrapolation," David Albright, president of the private Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, told The New York Times. "The extrapolation went too far."

The extrapolation was based, principally, on seemingly solid evidence that North Korea obtained about 20 centrifuges for the production of enriched uranium from Abdul Qadeer Khan in 2000.

When it transpired that North Korea was also buying aluminium tubes — not unlike the aluminium tubes mentioned to back US claims that Iraq had a nuclear weapons programme — the CIA and the Bush administration saw a "smoking gun" that convinced them the enriched uranium programme was up and running.