Scott Horton

First of all, on Ahmad, the pre-2003 nuclear weapons research, the CIA estimate in 2007 concluded that all research had stopped in 2003.

And Seymour Hersh reported that the reasoning behind that was mainly that America had gotten rid of Saddam Hussein for them.

Now, in Gareth Porter's book, Manufactured Crisis, he shows that the major conclusion that the DIA had made, that the Iranians were researching nuclear weapons, was based on some invoices that they had intercepted for some dual-use materials, some specialty magnets and things that they thought, boy, this looks like this could be part of a weaponization program, a secret program here.

And Gareth Porter, who's a really great critic of all of these policies and claims,

says, hey, this was a good faith misunderstanding by DIA.

They were doing their job.

But it turned out the IAEA later, when America gave them that information, the IAEA went and verified, oh, there's the magnet and there's this and there's that.

And all those dual use items actually were being used for civilian purposes.

And so then, as Gareth writes in his book, the only real reason

that the NIE said that they even had a program before 2003 was essentially because they didn't want to dispute their last mistaken conclusion.

So they said, OK, well, that was right up until then.

But that was when that changed.

And then the other half of their reason for accepting that there ever was a nuclear weapons research program in the country before 2003 was the smoking laptop.

I'm sorry, I think I misspoke earlier when I said that the laptop was in 2005.

That was just the Washington Post story that had a bunch of stuff about it.

That was in 2003 as well, or 2004 possibly.

But it was still all, again, forged by the Israelis and funneled through the MEK cult, but was obsolete essentially and had nothing in it.

at least the accusations, and it weren't past 03.

And so there's really no reason to believe that there was actually a nuclear weapons research program even before 03, which then, again, the National Intelligence Council says ended in 2003 and hasn't been restarted since then.

Yes, nothing in the smoking laptop held up.