The U.S. intelligence agencies’ Annual Threat Assessment (ATA) is billed as an opportunity “for the American people to receive an unvarnished and unbiased account of the real and present dangers that our nation faces.”
That’s according to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark), chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who personally presided over a public hearing this year to hear its conclusions.
It’s too bad neither he nor almost any other senator who sits on the committee seemed to pay attention to it, if current discourse over the Israel-Iran war is anything to go by.
On March 25, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard delivered the U.S. Intelligence Community’s (IC) collective conclusions covering a broad swath of national security issues and geographic areas — including the threat posed by Iran and its possible development of a nuclear weapon.
“The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” she told the committee bluntly. Gabbard was echoing an assessment that U.S. intelligence agencies have been making since 2007.
Yet despite this testimony, most of the committee members have issued statements over the past days and weeks that have entirely ignored this assessment, instead painting a picture of an Iran speeding toward a nuclear bomb, and Israel’s self-proclaimed “preemptive” war against Iran as an unavoidable and understandable act of self-defense...
read more here