HERE WE GO AGAIN

Strong leads, dead ends in nuclear case on Iran (Dafna Linzer, Washington Post, February, 7th, 2006)

Iranian engineers have completed sophisticated drawings of a deep subterranean shaft, according to officials who have examined classified documents in the hands of U.S. intelligence for more than 20 months. Complete with remote-controlled sensors to measure pressure and heat, the plans for the 400-meter tunnel appear designed for an underground atomic test that might one day announce Tehran's arrival as a nuclear power, the officials said.

By the estimates of U.S. and allied intelligence analysts, that day remains as much as a decade away -- assuming that Iran applies the full measure of its scientific and industrial resources to the project and encounters no major technical hurdles. But whether Iran's leaders have reached that decision and what concrete progress the effort has made remain divisive questions among government analysts and U.N. inspectors.

In the three years since Iran was forced to acknowledge having a secret uranium-enrichment program, Western governments and the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, have amassed substantial evidence to test the Tehran government's assertion that it plans to build nothing more than peaceful nuclear power plants. Often circumstantial, usually ambiguous and always incomplete, the evidence has confounded efforts by policymakers, intelligence officials and U.S. allies to reach a confident judgment about Iran's intentions and a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

Drawings of the unbuilt test site, not disclosed publicly before, appear to U.S. officials to signal at least the ambition to test a nuclear explosive. But U.S. and U.N. experts who have studied them said the undated drawings do not clearly fit into a larger picture. Nowhere, for example, does the word "nuclear" appear on them.

Not only has the left succeeded in convincing much of the general public that the war on terror is a domestic policing operation entitling enemy combatants to the full benefit of legal process on the public dime, it has also succeeded in casting international relations with rogue states in the same light. Iran may violate treaties, hurl a constant stream of invective at the West, destabilize Iraq, call for Israel’s extinction, thumb it’s nose at the IAEA and play “Where’s Waldo” with its nuclear program, but none of that justifies a response unless and until there is concrete proof beyond a reasonable doubt that she is building a bomb (from plans clearly marked “nuclear”). Meanwhile, the West plays the prosecutor on whose shoulders rests the entire burden of proof while Iran enjoys the right to remain silent and challenge the jurisdiction of the court.