Iran Still on Track for 2015 ICBM Flight Test

Greetings,

(FYI….This could be hawks in the government dropping this info to push towards confrontation with Iran because it is not bowing to Western/US demands of nuclear double standards, but it is being reported by the conservative intel website free beacon)

    Iran Still on Track for 2015 ICBM Flight Test

BY: Bill Gertz

Iran is continuing work on a long-range ballistic missile that could be flight-tested by next year despite the latest Pentagon report to Congress on Tehran’s military that omitted earlier references to the looming ICBM threat.

“The 2014 Iran Military Power report confirms that Iran could have an ICBM capability by 2015,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee.

“We have known this since well before the Obama administration,” Rogers said. “This unchanging fact is one of the reasons I have been and continue to be concerned about the administration’s efforts to dismantle our missile defenses.”

Rogers said that suggestions that somehow the danger of Iran’s developing long-range missile capabilities has diminished, or that the Pentagon report has altered U.S. intelligence assessments “is untrue.”

Greg Thielmann, a former State Department intelligence analyst, told Insidedefense.com that the omission represented a significant shift in assessments of the Iranian missile program.

Thielmann, now with the liberal Arms Control Association, said the language change means the U.S. intelligence community is “losing confidence” in its earlier prediction that the Iranians could test an ICBM by 2015. He accused advocates of missile defense of using the estimate to “pump up the Iranian threat.”

Thielmann, in an interview, stood by his assertion that the omission is significant. “I think that 2015 number is growing a little moldy,” he said. “They’ve made the same prediction for three years and there’s little or no evidence of movement in that direction” of an ICBM flight test.

Rogers stated that the comments by arms control activists about the supposed change in the missile threat estimate were misguided and based on a lack of access to intelligence reporting.

The use of the omission by arms controllers “shows why it is a mistake to rely on so-called ‘experts’ who don’t have access to the intelligence policy makers see and use every day,” Rogers said.

“The debate about the ballistic missile threat to the United States deserves facts and not the disarmament community’s biases and fantasies,” he said.

A Pentagon spokeswoman declined to comment on the language changes in the report on Iran’s ICBM program…..MORE HERE

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