Iran NIE ... delayed... for 'classified' reasons

DECLASSIFIED/ here

"... The reasons behind the latest delay are murky; two of the officials said the precise reasons for the latest delay are classified. But it is likely that the various intel agencies are still reviewing, revising, and debating the document to reach an agreement about what it should say. In the past, this has been a long and sometimes contentious process. The final product is supposed to reflect the consensus view of U.S. intelligence as a whole, though dissents often pepper the footnotes.....

The U.S. officials said that even when it is finally finished, the Iran-nuke NIE update may remain classified in its entirety; the Obama administration, they said, is unlikely to allow the publication even of a declassified extract of the document's key judgments, as was done with the original 2007 document.

The widely debated 2007 report concluded that U.S. agencies "judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program," and that "the halt lasted at least several years." The 2007 NIE also said that American agencies assessed "with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons." This assessment has been widely criticized by European and Israeli intelligence agencies. They believe that Iran has been pursuing nuclear-weapons capability all along.

As Declassified has reported, the updated Iran-nuke NIE is expected to be more hawkish about Iran's nuclear intentions. Officials familiar with the intelligence community's latest assessments say U.S. analysts now believe that Iran may well have resumed "research" on nuclear weapons, as European and Israeli intelligence agencies have insisted for years. But U.S. intelligence agencies still believe that Iran is not engaged in the “development” of nuclear weapons—that is, actually trying to build a bomb."