Obama aides dismiss Seymour Hersh's Iran story

There’s no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons, Seymour Hersh writes in this week’s New Yorker - but the Obama administration is pushing back strongly, with one senior official saying the article garnered “a collective eye roll” from the White House.

In “Iran and the Bomb,” from the issue dated June 6, Hersh adds up what’s known about the Iranian nuclear program and concludes that the Obama administration is overstating the threat coming from Tehran, just as the Bush administration did nearly a decade ago when sizing up Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.

But two administration officials told POLITICO’s Playbook that’s not the case.

“[A]ll you need to read to be deeply concerned about Iran’s nuclear program is the substantial body of information already in the public domain, including the most recent IAEA report,” a senior administration official said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency latest report, released to The Associated Press and Reuters last week, says the agency has been given new evidence by its members that Iran is working to develop nuclear weapons.

“There is a clear, ongoing pattern of deception, and Iran has repeatedly refused to respond to the IAEA’s questions about the military dimensions of [its] nuclear program, including those about the covert site at Qom,” the senior administration official added. “These examples and more make us deeply skeptical of Iran’s nuclear intentions.”

And a senior intelligence official also ripped Hersh, saying his article amounted to nothing more than “a slanted book report on a long narrative that’s already been told many times over.”

“We’ve been clear with the world about what we know about the Iranian nuclear program: Tehran is keeping its options open despite the fact that the community of nations demands otherwise,” the official added.

Hersh’s past articles on the Bush administration’s conduct of the Iraq war included allegations that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld went outside usual intelligence protocol to help make the case for the 2003 invasion. Hersh also did some of the earliest reporting on the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison by military police.

Hersh has faced criticism for his heavy reliance on anonymous sources, but New Yorker editor David Remnick has repeatedly said he stands by his reporter’s work.

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