Here we go again...

Get ready for another bunch of lies leading to another unnecessary war:

Nuclear Agency for U.N. Faults Report on Iran by U.S. House
By David E. Sanger
New York Times
September 15, 2006

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 — The International Atomic Energy Agency has complained about a staff report from the House Intelligence Committee, saying that it “contains erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated information’’ about Iran’s nuclear program. Agency officials said Thursday that their concerns had echoes of their arguments with the Bush administration over Iraq three years ago.

The charges were contained in a letter dated Sept. 12 and sent to Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the committee. Its unclassified staff report, released in mid-August, was widely seen as an effort to prod American intelligence agencies to be more aggressive in their examination of Iran’s nuclear program, amid charges from some conservatives that the mistakes made in assessing Iraq’s programs four years ago had bred an overly cautious atmosphere.

But the staff report immediately came under criticism, especially from Democrats on the committee, who said it overstated aspects of the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program. The committee’s vice chairman, Representative Jane Harman of California, accused the staff of taking shortcuts that inflated the Iranian threat.

The report was overseen by Fredrick Fleitz, a former C.I.A. officer who worked for John R. Bolton, the ambassador to the United Nations, when he was the State Department’s leading hawk on Iran.

The letter from the atomic energy agency, the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency, was first disclosed in The Washington Post on Thursday. It charges that a caption under a picture of Iran’s main nuclear site at Natanz falsely states that Tehran is “enriching uranium to weapons grade’’ with a small collection of centrifuges, the high-speed machines that are used to turn uranium into a fuel usable in nuclear power plants — or bombs. The letter says the uranium was enriched only to 3.6 percent — a level suitable for producing power, but far short of the 90 percent or so commonly associated with fuel for weapons.

A spokesman for the committee, Jamal Ware, said that while “there may be an issue with the caption, the substance of the report is clear, that Iran is working toward the ability to produce weapons grade uranium, but they are not there yet.’’ He said the report was intended to begin a discussion on Iran intelligence.

A senior European diplomat, speaking on the condition of routine diplomatic anonymity, said, “The view at the I.A.E.A. was that this House report exaggerated the evidence, and people had to put a marker down fast.’’

“No one wants a repeat of 2003,’’ the official said, a reference to the open dispute between the Bush administration and the director general of the atomic energy agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, over whether there was evidence of nuclear activity in Iraq.

Dr. ElBaradei was ridiculed by administration officials at the time; in recent months, though, the administration has cited his reports in pressing their case against Iran.