No End to Innuendo for Dems

The NY Times article this morning "Some in G.O.P. Say Iran Threat Is Played Down", is another vehicle to accuse Republicans of warmongering:

The House Intelligence Committee report released Wednesday was written primarily by Republican staff members on the committee, and privately some Democrats criticized the report for using innuendo and unsubstantiated assertions to inflate the threat that Iran posed to the United States.

The report’s cover page shows a picture of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran speaking at a lectern that bears the message “The World Without Zionism.”

Page 3 of the report lists several public comments from Mr. Ahmadinejad, including his statement, “The annihilation of the Zionist regime will come. . . . Israel must be wiped off the map.

Well Democrats may speak softly and carry no stick at all, but Iran's nutcase president has not been private at all in his remarks.

Where's the innuendo in "Israel must be wiped off the map"?

Some intelligence "experts" continue to place their faith in best-case scenarios of Iran being 5-10 years away. As one observer states in the article, if North Korea were to ship Iran a nuke tomorrow, how close would they be then? And aren't analysts of global disaster supposed to at least lay out worst case scenarios in a balanced presentation? Wouldn't that be the prudent thing to do? After all, as someone else said, we can be successful 99.9% of the time, but the terrorists only have to get through once to hit us.

UPDATE: Washington Post:U.S. Spy Agencies Criticized on Iran:

The administration has not attributed its assertions about Iran's weapons program to U.S. intelligence, as it had done about Iraq's in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion. Instead, it has pointed to years of Iranian concealment and has questioned why a country with as much oil as Iran would need a huge nuclear energy program.

The House report notes several years of findings by international nuclear inspectors that point to the possibility of a nuclear weapons program and suggests that more U.S. intelligence resources should be devoted to finding proof.

"Although Iran . . . with active denial and deception efforts, is a difficult target for intelligence analysis and collection, it is imperative that the U.S. Intelligence Community devote significant resources against this vital threat," the report said.

And here's this snippet, pregnant with possibilities, for what it's worth, from MEMRI.

Time is not on our side, nor on Israel's.