Report: Obama Lied For Years About Iran's Nuclear Breakout Ability

The breakout period is the time, I gather, it would take Iran to build a bomb, once it sets its mind to it and abandons any pretense of abiding by limitations it previously agreed to under the atomic energy treaty.

For years, to reassure the public, he insisted that Iran was more than a year from developing a working nuclear bomb.

But he lied.

Obama loves reassuring the public, and he doesn't mind at all lying to do so.

In fact, for years, Obama's had a report that our best estimate of Iran's breakout time was only two to three months.

When Obama wanted to reassure the public not to worry about Iran's nukes, he lied to them, insisting that their breakout period was more than a year.

Now that he wants to panic the public into accepting his deal to install Iran as the hegemon of the middle east, he declassifies the report he's been sitting on for years, that Iran's breakout period is as short as two months, and no more than three.

The Barack Obama administration has estimated for years that Iran was at most three months away from enriching enough nuclear fuel for an atomic bomb. But the administration only declassified this estimate at the beginning of the month, just in time for the White House to make the case for its Iran deal to Congress and the public.

Speaking to reporters and editors at our Washington bureau on Monday, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz acknowledged that the U.S. has assessed for several years that Iran has been two to three months away from producing enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon. When asked how long the administration has held this assessment, Moniz said: "Oh quite some time." He added: "They are now, they are right now spinning, I mean enriching with 9,400 centrifuges out of their roughly 19,000. Plus all the . . . . R&D work. If you put that together it's very, very little time to go forward. That's the 2-3 months."

Brian Hale, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, confirmed to me Monday that the two-to-three-month estimate for fissile material was declassified on April 1.

Here is the puzzling thing: When Obama began his second term in 2013, he sang a different tune. He emphasized that Iran was more than a year away from a nuclear bomb, without mentioning that his intelligence community believed it was only two to three months away from making enough fuel for one, long considered the most challenging task in building a weapon. Today Obama emphasizes that Iran is only two to three months away from acquiring enough fuel for a bomb, creating a sense of urgency for his Iran agreement.

Back in 2013, when Congress was weighing new sanctions on Iran and Obama was pushing for more diplomacy, his interest was in tamping down that sense of urgency. On the eve of a visit to Israel, Obama told Israel's Channel Two, "Right now, we think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon, but obviously we don't want to cut it too close."

On Oct. 5 of that year, Obama contrasted the U.S. view of an Iranian breakout with that of Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who at the time said Iran was only six months away from nuclear capability. Obama told the Associated Press, "Our assessment continues to be a year or more away. And in fact, actually, our estimate is probably more conservative than the estimates of Israeli intelligence services."

I've quoted a lot from Eli Lake, but click on that link to discover Obama's new hustle: Now he's claiming that if we sign his deal with Iran, now Iran's breakout period will be over a year.

That is, this lying grifter first claimed that Iran was over a year from developing a nuke, to dishonestly reassure the public that he was on top of things. Now that he seeks to pressure the country into signing a deal against its interests, he warns that without this deal Iran's only two to three months from breakout, so we need to get on top of this ASAP.

And he adds, with a dishonest fillip of the middle finger, that if we do sign this deal, Iran will be back to that completely-fictitious one-year breakout period he lied about for so long.

Congressmen are trying to "research" this last claim -- and they say they can find no evidence that Obama's deal will extend Iran's breakout period from the real two to three months to the dishonest and phantasmal one year he'd previously been advertising.

I got this story from Noah Rothman -- who goes on to note that when Obama is lying (which is frequently), he has the sociopath's tendency to not only lie, but lie in an arrogant and dismissive way, making sport of his challengers (who are actually telling the truth) as themselves deluded or liars.

As I say, this is the mark of a sociopath. Whereas a non-sociopath feels guilt about lying, and thus lies halfheartedly, the sociopath doesn't care about the lie, and only feels the power struggle between himself and another, and that struggle enrages him-- how dare that person contradict me.

And thus the sociopath lies not just without remorse, but with actual righteous anger informing the lie.

posted by Ace at 11:53 AM

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