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Shir Hever is an Israeli economist and commentator who researches the economic aspects of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.

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[1] Some have tried to place the blame on the lies of one Iraqi defector, but we all know that a single source is never sufficient to support intelligence, and was certainly not enough to sustain “with almost certainty” the specific claims of various types of weapons allegedly possessed by Iraq.

[2] Last week a new estimation was finally reported, and it is indeed less conclusive this time. Haaretz was quick to publish the story in Hebrew with a misleading headline, reading “American National Intelligence Estimate: Iran returns to its military nuclear program; an opposite assessment of the one from three years ago, which then ruled that Iran halted its military nuclear project in 2003”. Sadly, this was the product either of amateur journalism or of an attempt to attract Israeli mainstream readers, since the text itself paints a completely different picture, almost the opposite. First, as The Washington Post writes, the 2007 report is not reversed: “The new assessment does not entirely refute the 2007 report’s most controversial finding, which held that Iran’s leaders had halted nuclear weaponization research in 2003”. Moreover, as the Washington Post and South Africa’s Times Live note, the new report is inconclusive (to say the least) regarding the very existence of a nuclear military program,: “The current assessment says that Tehran likely resumed some nuclear weapons research, but does not conclude that it has a full program to build an atomic bomb”; it even notes that “the slow and scattered nature of the effort reflects renewed debate within the government over whether to build a bomb”.

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Eyal Clyne is an Israeli researcher of society in Israel-Palestine. He focuses on the conflict and other Israeli political issues. Some of the posts on his Hebrew blog appear also in English and elsewhere, and some of his pieces for JNews are also cross-posted with other sites.

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Mitchell Plitnick is the former Director of the US Office of B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories and was previously the Director of Education and Policy for Jewish Voice for Peace. He is a widely published policy analyst.

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This piece is cross-posted with Antony Lerman’s blog, Context is everything.

This article may be reproduced on condition that JNews is cited as its source.

Eyal Clyne is an Israeli researcher of society(ies) in Israel-Palestine. He focuses on the conflict and other Israeli political issues. Some of the posts on his Hebrew blog appear also in English and elsewhere, and some of his pieces for JNews are also cross-posted with other sites.

This piece was originally posted on the Israeli-based +972magazine