John Bolton: Iran May Be Closer To A Bomb Than We Think
A report that Iran is about a year away from having the capability to build a nuclear bomb may be too optimistic, contended John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
“I worry the publicly available information is giving only a very small picture and that Iran is actually even much further along,” Bolton said in a radio interview.
Bolton was on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on New York’s WABC Radio. The former ambassador was asked about a statement from a former head of UN nuclear inspections claiming Iran is now just a year or so away from having enough enriched uranium to assemble a nuclear bomb.
Olli Heinonen wrote in an article published earlier this week that Iran made this advancement after switching production of its higher-grade enriched uranium to a new, underground site.
Reacting to the one-year timeline, Bolton stated, “I think it can be even less than that.”
Continued Bolton: “They’ve got, by publicly available information from the International Atomic Energy Agency, enough low-enriched uranium that if enriched up to weapons grade would be enough for four weapons.”
“So they’ve got more work to do, but they are already well on their way,” he said. Bolton said 2012 will be a key year to stop Iran’s nuclear program.
Obama Campaign Site Accused Of ‘Ridiculous Distortion’
President Obama’s reelection campaign is drawing fire for claiming GOP presidential contenders Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich would all cut foreign aid to Israel.
“Stand against ‘zeroing out’ aid to Israel,” reads the title of a page of Obama’s official campaign website. It continues: “Republican candidates for president Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich all say they would cut foreign aid to Israel – and every other country – to zero.”
“Stand up to this extreme isolationism and join the call to reject the Romney-Perry-Gingrich plan.”
The claim was so faulty that Politifact.com, a Pulitzer Prize winning fact-check project operated by reporters at the Tampa Bay Times, labeled it a “ridiculous distortion” deserving of the site’s “Pants-On-Fire” rating.
Obama’s campaign told Politifact.com that the website’s claim on foreign aid stems from a series of statements made at a foreign-policy themed debate last November in which Romney, Perry, and Gingrich each stated they would review U.S. foreign aid.
Discussing U.S. aid to Pakistan, Perry stated at the debate: “The foreign aid budget in my administration for every country is going to start at zero dollars. Zero dollars. And then we’ll have a conversation. Then we’ll have a conversation in this country about whether or not a penny of our taxpayer dollar needs to go into those countries.”
Perry did not say he would cut off foreign aid to all countries, but that foreign aid would start at “zero” and then aid would be discussed.
At the debate, Gingrich said he agreed with Perry’s position.
When asked whether his aid review policy included Israel, Perry said, “Absolutely. Every country would start at zero. Obviously, Israel is a special ally. And my bet is that we would be funding them at some substantial level. But it makes sense for everyone to come in at zero and make your case.”
Romney himself later agreed with this same foreign aid review approach when he addressed Pakistan at the same debate.
Following the debate, all three candidates clarified that their respective administrations would continue to fund Israel.
Cass Sunstein Once Advocated That Government Infiltrate Social Websites
Just prior to his appointment as President Obama’s so-called regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein wrote a lengthy academic paper suggesting the government should “infiltrate” social network websites, chat rooms and message boards.
Such “cognitive infiltration,” Sunstein argued, should be used to enforce a U.S. government ban on “conspiracy theorizing.”
Among the beliefs Sunstein classified as a “conspiracy theory” is the suggestion that the theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud.
The find comes as a government document reportedly relates that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s command center routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report.
The government document states such monitoring is meant to “collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture” to help manage national or international emergency events.
While the DHS may be monitoring websites for security reasons, Sunstein advocated such actions with another goal in mind. Sunstein’s official title is Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
In a 2008 Harvard law paper, “Conspiracy Theories,” Sunstein and co-author Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard law professor, ask, “What can government do about conspiracy theories?”