News for December 7th, 2007
America was attacked soon after the dawn broke over Honolulu 66 years ago today. This day, December 7th, marks the day that our country officially entered WWII.
In light of our current situation it’s worth taking some time this evening to remember Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese assault on our Hawaiian naval fortress was unprecedented, but not entirely unexpected. There had been ominous signs of an impending attack by the Japanese Navy for months. Even as late as that morning there was a chance, as radar stations picked up unexpected signs of incoming aircraft, to get our fleet underway and fighters into the path of the surprise attack.
Ninety minutes later 2,386 Americans were dead, and half again as many wounded. A large portion of the Pacific fleet was damaged or destroyed, along with nearly every warplane in Hawaii.
It stands as a seminal moment in our nation’s history, a moment that unified the country to fight a war far greater than any before or after.
We’ve been caught off-guard a few times since then, most recently on that September morning in 2001 when hijacked airliners were crashed into New York and Virginia. The reaction provoked by that terrorist attack was just as severe as the outrage sparked by Japanese dive-bombers sixty-six years ago.
America rose up in anger, reached out, and swatted down the provincial Taliban government in Afghanistan. Unfortunately the people actually responsible for planning that September attack on our country managed to slip through the GPS-guided steel fist of the U.S. military.
And here’s where the two events start to become very different.
If he is ever captured, there will never be a war crimes trial for Osama Bin Laden, because he is not a national leader. He’s the disgustingly wealthy son of a Saudi construction magnate, who also happens to be a religious fanatic.
He has scores of devoted followers around the world. This has, for some reason, completely paralyzed our country.
Exactly sixty-six years ago the Japanese leadership had an entire industrialized nation mobilized for war. They had occupied China’s industrial heartland, bombed both of the two largest American military bases in the Pacific, and were preparing to establish dominion over the entire Western Pacific.
If, on that morning sixty-six years ago, the Japanese strike aircraft had managed to hit the massive fuel depot on Oahu, the closest resupply would have been in San Diego. If their successes had been just a little more absolute that morning the entire outcome of WWII could have changed. Our aircraft carriers, so crucial to the eventual victory, would have been thousands of miles from resupply, vulnerable and alone.
If Bin Laden’s men had succeeded in crashing one more airliner, they would have crashed one more airliner. That’s it.
Pearl Harbor represented an existential threat to our nation. The terrorist attacks of 2001 were a tragic loss for those who lost loved ones, but no more than that.
The association of terrorist groups calling themselves al Qaeda would have been a mere blip in history if not for the catastrophically successful efforts the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal of neoconservative ideologues to harness the country’s momentary unity of purpose to their own long-standing plans for invading Iraq.
The attack on Pearl Harbor sixty-six years ago made history; and to equate the two events is an affront to the generation that fought WWII, and tacit respect as adversaries for the pig-sucking Islamic radicals that annoy our generation.
To those Americans who believe that their lives changed on that September morning in 2001, go ask a veteran of WWII how they felt about Japanese dive bombers plummeting towards Pearl Harbor with their lethal cargo sixty-six years ago. Go ask a veteran and learn what a real fight was all about.
This is the Timothy Jordan Show News for December 7th, 2007, here tonight remembering the sacrifices and dedication of all our nation’s battle-bourne.
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From past wars, to future wars barely averted.
We’ve been hearing a lot of rhetoric about the Iranian nuclear program out of the Bush administration over the last few years. So much hot air was blown by war hawks in and out of the government that this News Staff predicted an attack on Iran way back in the summer of 2004. Surprised by the lack of imagery from precision-guided weapons falling on the suburbs of Tehran as those months ran by, the Staff and I re-upped our estimated timetable for attack, only to see the growing civil war in Iraq derail Administration plans, and our predictions.
But that didn’t stop dependable old Dick Cheney, who as recently as a few weeks ago was trumpeting the danger of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. This was, of course, despite the complete and total lack of evidence that the Iranian nuclear research program is anything but peaceful.
Cheney and his supporters like to gesticulate at the deeply buried Natanz uranium enrichment facility as proof that the Iranian program has military aspirations. It’s certainly designed to take some punishment; but given the penchant that the Israelis have for bombing nuclear reactors in other countries in the region, my staff and I could fault the Iranians for not burying all of their nuclear facilities.
Well the news this week wasn’t good for the Administration. At the request of Democratic lawmakers the nation’s intelligence agencies have released a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) focused on the Iranian nuclear research program.
Our Vice President has been saying that the Iranian nuclear program is a threat; and our President warned last month that keeping pressure on Iran is vital to prevent World War III. The Republican presidential candidates have kept up similar rhetoric. The official word from Washington has been that Iran is a clear and present threat to our nation’s security.
But our nation’s intelligence agencies now believe that the Iranians stopped all weapons development work in 2003. The National Intelligence Estimate released on Monday says in the strongest language possible that the Iranian nuclear weapons program will be a non-issue well into the next decade.
This happens to match up with what international weapons experts, and the News Staff here, have been saying now for years.
Iran’s nuclear research program is based on second-hand Pakistani equipment stolen from Europe in the 1970s. They’re not exactly working with cutting-edge equipment to begin with, and lacking the tools and expertise to modernize what they already have.
The NIE pays particular attention to the uranium enrichment program, centered in the Natanz facility that I mentioned a moment ago. Uranium worries nuclear weapons experts because it represents the easiest route to building a functional nuclear weapon. Quite simply it wants to explode. Put 25 kilos of weapons-grade uranium (WgU) together and it will detonate. That’s it. A weapon made of WgU could be as simple as two blocks of uranium metal separated by a brick. Pull out the brick, and you’ve got an atomic bomb.
So it’s understandable that weapons experts are concerned about Iran’s efforts to enrich uranium. The problem for fear-mongers in the administration is two-fold. First, there’s a long distance between uranium enriched for a nuclear reactor and uranium enriched for a weapon. Reactor-grade uranium is 5% enriched. Weapons-grade is over 90%. That’s a huge leap.
The second problem is even more basic and practical. The equipment needed to enrich uranium is very hard to maintain. Basic first-generation centrifuges for uranium, we’re talking 1940s technology, spun at 900mph. Modern designs spin even faster, which means that an operating centrifuge is only moments away from catastrophic failure at any given moment.
It’s for this reason that international inspectors have witnessed Iranian centrifuges operating well under their capacity. The Iranians don’t trust their own equipment. And what equipment they have is limited to begin with.
Even if they immediately began work to create WgU, Iran’s 3,000 operating centrifuges would take up to eight years to produce a single nuclear weapon, according to the NIE.
So the Bush Administration has overstated the threat, but this doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to be concerned about. The President is right about one thing: we should be concerned about nuclear programs. Iran may not currently have a nuclear weapons program, but they could; and that’s not unique to them alone. The problem with all nuclear research programs, whether they be Iranian, or Pakistani, Brazilian, Mongolian, or American, is that the step from civilian reactors to weapons is largely a matter of intention.
It’s not that the Iranian program is dangerous, it’s that all nuclear programs are dangerous.
The thing to remember is that nuclear reactors produce material that can be used in weapons; and that the fuel for nuclear reactors is in itself only a matter of refinement away from the fuel for weapons. Our country’s political leaders are freaking out over the possibility of a single Iranian nuclear weapon sometime in the next decade when Pakistan maintains up to 50 weapons in an unstable political climate, and we ourselves have over 5,000 which sometimes go for unauthorized flights on B-52s.
We fault the Iranians for seeking to develop a civilian nuclear program because it could be the starting point for weapons development when our nation’s leaders are lobbying to build new weapons of our own, smaller, more precise, and more likely to be used.
Who’s more dangerous?
• NIE, Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities PDF (134.2KB)
• via Arms Control Wonk, image of the Iranian centrifuges
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There was an interesting side note to Monday’s NIE release. The President’s National Security Advisor, Steven Hadley, spoke to reporters during a press conference the next morning and told reporters that his boss, Mr. Bush, only found out about the NIE’s conclusions last Wednesday.
Wait, what?
So here’s our President, who by his own account believes that an Iranian nuclear weapon could lead to WWIII, working until last week in complete ignorance of the conclusions drawn by our government’s intelligence agencies about the status of the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Mr. Hadley told reporters that the intelligence community came to this decision only last week.
Wait, what?
The IAEA has been crawling all over Iran since the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a terrorist group by Iranian standards, first revealed the presence of covert nuclear Iranian research sites in 2002. The Washington Post reported this week that information critical to the NIE has been circulating in Washington since July.
The President told reporters that he first heard of this new intelligence in August.
It’s now December.
The White House sought to clarify these statements as the week progressed, saying that Mitch McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, only told the President during their August meeting that there was new intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program, that it may have been suspended.
By all accounts the ever-inquisitive Mr. Bush, displaying the sharp and probing intellect that we’ve come to expect from him, didn’t ask any more questions. And then, in the weeks and months that followed between August and last week, he displayed the incredible single-minded resolve that’s been a hallmark of his Administration by refusing to change course and request any updates from Mr. McConnell on this issue critical to preventing WWIII during their daily briefings.
It takes a fearless devotion to ignorance to remain this out-of-touch.
• WaPo, U.S. Finds That Iran Halted Nuclear Arms Bid in 2003
• Mr. Bush speaking to the press, 12.04.07
• Mr. Hadley speaking to the press, 12.03.07
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What’s the CIA been up to, when they’re not helping compose Intelligence Estimates? They’ve destroying records of potentially illegal interrogation sessions, according to the New York Times.
And they’re helping revise the Guantanamo torture manuals.
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Let the Global War on Human Rights roll on.
And the show will roll on, but not before excellence.
Prank calls don’t often reach to the level of excellence, but one this week deserves mention.
Earlier this week President Bush had a blinking light on his answering machine. It was a message from the President of Iceland, asking him to call back.
One problem: the President of Iceland never called Mr. Bush’s private line. The Secret Service reportedly tracked the call back to an Icelandic teenager. Somehow he got a hold of our President’s private phone number, but he refuses to say how.
The best guess out there right now is that the secret number was inadvertently revealed when Jenna Bush called her parents at the White House while she was appearing on the Ellen show.
Amazingly enough, the President wasn’t too busy going over intelligence reports.