Fluent Essays

Matthew Israel Byrge English 1020 Film Review You are writing a critical film analysis, which requires a close engagement with the material. I am not expecting, nor am I wanting, a play-by-play regurgitation of the film, but instead, a thoughtful critical engagement of the filmmaker’s choices based on the rhetorical appeals and/or strategies we have been learning this semester. This means that you must discuss the filmmaker’s use of ethos, pathos, and logos as well as other rhetorical strategies including audience and situation. You will also discuss logical fallacies that you see occurring within the context of the film. Rhetorical Situation/Explication: Imagine yourself as a film critic for a prestigious magazine or newspaper, such as Variety, The New Yorker or The New York Times. You will seek out examples of reviews from these publications (and others) as models. Your job is to demonstrate a critical analysis of the film’s content, as well as a discussion for the intended audience(s) and any relevant commentary on the film’s production/genre. You may reference our readings, but you are not allowed to use any other outside sources . So, you will not be unduly influenced, please do not consult any other film review of your chosen documentary film . You may, however, look to other reviews of other movies and/or documentaries as models, which can be found online or in the library databases. I do not want a “copy” of these models; they are only a guide to help you in the writing process. Remember we will be spending a lot of class time going over models and tips in writing film reviews. Refer to the Envision chapter and/or any other hand-outs that I give you. Objectives · You will read and analyze different types of texts; in this case visual (both sound and moving pictures). · You will become better aware of the different types of rhetorical situations. · You will conduct primary research using your observations by viewing a documentary film, distinguishing between fact, opinion, and point of view. · You will continue to provide constructive feedback in the form of peer collaboration. · You will be exposed to some controversial topics in these documentaries, but they are meant to give you a better awareness of the world around you and to make you better equipped in real world settings. · Remember your audience. You will be better able to engage with topics without making value judgments, but instead base your opinions on rhetorical techniques and appeals you see the filmmakers employing. · Since you are required to include a Works Cited page, we will be using your Easy Writer to practice documentation. Reminders You must adhere to the Paper Format hand-out you were given at the beginning of the semester. Failure to comply with proper Paper Format will result in deduction of points from this assignment. You must cite/incorporate specific articles I tell you to in your paper. Failure to do so will result in a deduction of points on this assignment. You must include a Works Cited with all the articles and film in MLA format. Requirements 1,400—1,500 words typed Works Cited page (does not count toward length of paper); must be in MLA style Times New Roman font 12-point font 1” inch margins on all sides Double-spaced Include an original title for your film review Notes (written or typed; must be turned in with final paper) Documentary Review Sheet (will be provided; must be turned in with all other notes) Presentation Notes In addition to meeting the above requirements, you will be graded on your comprehension/ability to analyze a theoretical framework as well as the originality with which you apply this framework to your own film. Please take copious notes while viewing the film. You may have to watch the film multiple times. In fact, I strongly encourage you to do so. Please keep all your notes because you will turn these in with the final draft of your film review. I will also provide you with a note-taking hand-out (mentioned above) that must be turned back in on top of all your other written and/or typed notes. Be neat in your transcriptions, for your own sake, in order to evaluate what you want to discuss in the written review later. Structuring the Paper Most critical analysis papers begin with a short summary of the work and then dive into the main points. Be concise in all parts of your analysis. Writing an outline (and following it) is crucial to remain focused on your topic and avoid summary or irrelevant description. The following is only a sample outline for a critical analysis paper: I Introduction · Identify the work being criticized and the film-maker · Present thesis – main point about the work · Preview your thesis - what are the steps you will take to prove your argument? II Short Summary of the Film · Does not need to be comprehensive - present only what the reader needs to know to understand your main points III Your Topic · Your main focus will likely involve a number of sub-points – mini-theses you use to prove your larger point · This should be the bulk of your review - I want to read your analysis about the work, not a summary of the movie IV Conclusion · Reflect on how you have proven your main point · Point out the importance of your point of view · Note potential avenues for additional research or analysis of shortcomings you see in the filmmaker’s choices Consider the following: LOGOS : structure, organization, realism/realistic, real events, accuracy PATHOS : emotion (more than just sappy, heart strings: fear, anger, self-righteousness), sentiment/sentimentality, over-sentimentality ETHOS : credibility, believable/believability, possibility, likelihood, sincerity, good intentions or dubious/ulterior motives   ** strengths = proper use of LPE ** strengths = illustrating or revealing certain logical fallacies ** weaknesses = improper use of LPE (= fallacies) ** WEAKNESSES = subtexts 4 Film Review You are writing a critical film analysis, which requires a close engagement with the material. I am not expecting, nor am I wanting, a play-by-play regurgitation of the film, but instead, a thoughtful critical engagement of the filmmaker’s choices based on the rhetorical appeals and/or strategies we have been learning this semester. This means that you must discuss the filmmaker’s use of ethos, pathos, and logos as well as other rhetorical strategies including audience and situation. You will also discuss logical fallacies that you see occurring within the context of the film. Rhetorical Situation/Explication: Imagine yourself as a film critic for a prestigious magazine or newspaper, such as Variety, The New Yorker or The New York Times. You will seek out examples of reviews from these publications (and others) as models. Your job is to demonstrate a critical analysis of the film’s content, as well as a discussion for the intended audience(s) and any relevant commentary on the film’s production/genre. You may reference our readings, but you are not allowed to use any other outside sources . So, you will not be unduly influenced, please do not consult any other film review of your chosen documentary film . You may, however, look to other reviews of other movies and/or documentaries as models, which can be found online or in the library databases. I do not want a “copy” of these models; they are only a guide to help you in the writing process. Remember we will be spending a lot of class time going over models and tips in writing film reviews. Refer to the Envision chapter and/or any other hand-outs that I give you. Objectives · You will read and analyze different types of texts; in this case visual (both sound and moving pictures). · You will become better aware of the different types of rhetorical situations. · You will conduct primary research using your observations by viewing a documentary film, distinguishing between fact, opinion, and point of view. · You will continue to provide constructive feedback in the form of peer collaboration. · You will be exposed to some controversial topics in these documentaries, but they are meant to give you a better awareness of the world around you and to make you better equipped in real world settings. · Remember your audience. You will be better able to engage with topics without making value judgments, but instead base your opinions on rhetorical techniques and appeals you see the filmmakers employing. · Since you are required to include a Works Cited page, we will be using your Easy Writer to practice documentation. Reminders You must adhere to the Paper Format hand-out you were given at the beginning of the semester. Failure to comply with proper Paper Format will result in deduction of points from this assignment. You must cite/incorporate specific articles I tell you to in your paper. Failure to do so will result in a deduction of points on this assignment. You must include a Works Cited with all the articles and film in MLA format. Requirements 1,400—1,500 words typed Works Cited page (does not count toward length of paper); must be in MLA style Times New Roman font 12-point font 1” inch margins on all sides Double-spaced Include an original title for your film review Notes (written or typed; must be turned in with final paper) Documentary Review Sheet (will be provided; must be turned in with all other notes) Presentation Notes In addition to meeting the above requirements, you will be graded on your comprehension/ability to analyze a theoretical framework as well as the originality with which you apply this framework to your own film. Please take copious notes while viewing the film. You may have to watch the film multiple times. In fact, I strongly encourage you to do so. Please keep all your notes because you will turn these in with the final draft of your film review. I will also provide you with a note-taking hand-out (mentioned above) that must be turned back in on top of all your other written and/or typed notes. Be neat in your transcriptions, for your own sake, in order to evaluate what you want to discuss in the written review later. Structuring the Paper Most critical analysis papers begin with a short summary of the work and then dive into the main points. Be concise in all parts of your analysis. Writing an outline (and following it) is crucial to remain focused on your topic and avoid summary or irrelevant description. The following is only a sample outline for a critical analysis paper: I Introduction · Identify the work being criticized and the film-maker · Present thesis – main point about the work · Preview your thesis - what are the steps you will take to prove your argument? II Short Summary of the Film · Does not need to be comprehensive - present only what the reader needs to know to understand your main points III Your Topic · Your main focus will likely involve a number of sub-points – mini-theses you use to prove your larger point · This should be the bulk of your review - I want to read your analysis about the work, not a summary of the movie IV Conclusion · Reflect on how you have proven your main point · Point out the importance of your point of view · Note potential avenues for additional research or analysis of shortcomings you see in the filmmaker’s choices Consider the following: LOGOS : structure, organization, realism/realistic, real events, accuracy PATHOS : emotion (more than just sappy, heart strings: fear, anger, self-righteousness), sentiment/sentimentality, over-sentimentality ETHOS : credibility, believable/believability, possibility, likelihood, sincerity, good intentions or dubious/ulterior motives   ** STRENGTHS = proper use of LPE ** STRENGTHS = illustrating or revealing certain logical fallacies ** WEAKNESSES = improper use of LPE (= fallacies) ** WEAKNESSES = subtexts Through the darkness of the pathways that we marched, evil and good lived side by side. And this is the nature of... Of life. We are in an unbalanced and inequivalent confrontation between democracies who are obliged to play by the rules and entities who think democracy is a joke. You can't convince fanatics by saying, "hey, hatred paralyzes you, love releases you." There are different rules that we have to play by. Female newsreader: Today, two of Iran's top nuclear scientists were targeted by hit squads. Female newsreader 2: ...In the capital Tehran. Male newsreader: ...The latest in a string of attacks. Female newsreader 3: Today's attack has all the hallmarks of major strategic sabotage. Female newsreader 4: Iran immediately accused the U.S. and Israel of trying to damage its nuclear program. I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran. Covert actions can help, can assist. They are needed, they are not all the time essential, and they, in no way, can replace political wisdom. Alex Gibney: Were the assassinations in Iran related to the Stuxnet computer attacks? Uh, next question, please. Male newsreader: Iran's infrastructure is being targeted by a new and dangerously powerful cyber worm. The so-called Stuxnet worm is specifically designed, it seems, to infiltrate and sabotage real-world power plants and factories and refineries. Male newsreader 2: It's not trying to steal information or grab your credit card, they're trying to get into some sort of industrial plant and wreak havoc trying to blow up an engine or... Male newsreader 4: No one knows who's behind the worm and the exact nature of its mission, but there are fears Iran will hold Israel or America responsible and seek retaliation. Male newsreader 5: It's not impossible that some group of hackers did it, but the security experts that are studying this really think this required the resource of a nation-state. Man: Okay, and spinning. Gibney: Okay, good. Here we go. What impact, ultimately, did the Stuxnet attack have? Can you say? I don't want to get into the details. Gibney: Since the event has already happened, why can't we talk more openly and publicly about Stuxnet? Yeah, I mean, my answer is because it's classified. I... I won't knowledge... You know, knowingly offer up anything I consider classified. Gibney: I know that you can't talk much about Stuxnet, because Stuxnet is officially classified. You're right on both those counts. Gibney: But there has been a lot reported about it in the press. I don't want to comment on this. I read it in the newspaper, the media, like you, but I'm unable to elaborate upon it. People might find it frustrating not to be able to talk about it when it's in the public domain, but... Gibney: I find it frustrating. Yeah, I'm sure you do. I don't answer that question. Unfortunately, I can't comment. I do not know how to answer that. Two answers before you even get started, I don't know, and if I did, we wouldn't talk about it anyway. Gibney: How can you have a debate if everything's secret? I think right now that's just where we are. No one wants to... Countries aren't happy about confessing or owning up to what they did because they're not quite sure where they want the system to go. And so whoever was behind Stuxnet hasn't admitted they were behind it. Gibney: Asking officials about Stuxnet was frustrating and surreal, like asking the emperor about his new clothes. Even after the cyber weapon had penetrated computers all over the world, no-one was willing to admit it was loose or talk about the dangers it posed. What was it about the Stuxnet operation that was hiding in plain sight? Maybe there was a way the computer code could speak for itself. Stuxnet first surfaced in Belarus. I started with a call to the man who discovered it when his clients in Iran began to panic over an epidemic of computer shutdowns. Had you ever seen anything quite so sophisticated before? I have seen very sophisticated viruses before, but they didn't have... this kind of... zero day. It was the first time in my practice. That led me to understand that I should notify web security companies ASAP about the fact that such a danger exists. Eric Chien: On a daily basis, basically we are sifting through a massive haystack looking for that proverbial needle. We get millions of pieces of new malicious threats and there are millions of attacks going on every single day. And not only are we trying to protect people and their computers and... And their systems and countries' infrastructure from being taken down by those attacks. But more importantly, we have to find the attacks that matter. When you're talking about that many, impact is extremely important. Eugene Kaspersky: Twenty years ago, the antivirus companies, they were hunting for computer viruses because there were not so many. So we had, like, tens of dozens a month, and there was just little numbers. Now, we collect millions of unique attacks every month. Vitaly Kamluk: This room we call a woodpecker's room or a virus lab, and this is where virus analysts sit. We call them woodpeckers because they are pecking the worms, network worms, and viruses. And we see, like, three different groups of hackers behind cyber-attacks. They are traditional cyber criminals. Those guys are interested only in illegal profit. And quick and dirty money. Activists, or hacktivists, they are hacking for fun or hacking to push some political message. And the third group is nation-states. They're interested in high-quality intelligence or sabotage activity. Chien: Security companies not only share information but we also share binary samples. So when this threat was found by a Belarusian security company on one of their customer's machines in Iran, the sample was shared amongst the security community. When we try to name threats, we just try to pick some sort of string, some sort of words, that are inside of the binary. In this case, there was a couple of words in there and we took pieces of each, and that formed Stuxnet. I got the news about Stuxnet from one of my engineers. He came to my office, opened the door, and he said, "so, Eugene, of course you know that we are waiting for something really bad. It happened." Gibney: Give me some sense of what it was like in the lab at that time. Was there a palpable sense of amazement that you had something really different there? Well, I wouldn't call it amazement. It was a kind of a shock. It went beyond our worst fears, our worst nightmares, and this continued the more we analyzed. The more we researched, the more bizarre the whole story got. We look at so much malware every day that we can just look at the code and straightaway we can say, "Okay, there's something bad going on here, and I need to investigate that." And that's the way it was when we looked at Stuxnet for the first time. We opened it up and there was just bad things everywhere. Just like, okay, this is bad and that's bad, and, you know, we need to investigate this. And just suddenly we had, like, a hundred questions straightaway. The most interesting thing that we do is detective work where we try to track down who's behind a threat, what are they doing, what's their motivation, and try to really stop it at the root. And it is kind of all-consuming. You get this new puzzle and it's very difficult to put it down, you know, work until, like, 4:00 am in the morning and figure these things out. And I was in that zone where I was very consumed by this, very excited about it, very interested to know what was happening. And Eric was also in that same sort of zone. So the two of us were, like, back and forth all the time. Chien: Liam and I continued to grind at the code, sharing pieces, comparing notes, bouncing ideas off of each other. We realized that we needed to do what we called deep analysis, pick apart the threat, every single byte, every single zero, one, and understand everything that was inside of it. And just to give you some context, we can go through and understand every line of code for the average threat in minutes. And here we are one month into this threat and we were just starting to discover what we call the payload or its whole purpose. When looking at the Stuxnet code, it's 20 times the size of the average piece of code but contains almost no bugs inside of it. And that's extremely rare. Malicious code always has bugs inside of it. This wasn't the case with Stuxnet. It's dense and every piece of code does something and does something right in order to conduct its attack. One of the things that surprised us was that Stuxnet utilized what's called a zero-day exploit, or basically, a piece of code that allows it to spread without you having to do anything. You don't have to, for example, download a file and run it. A zero-day exploit is an exploit that nobody knows about except the attacker. So there's no protection against it. There's been no patch released. There's been zero days protection, you know, against it. That's what attackers value, because they know 100 percent if they have this zero-day exploit, they can get in wherever they want. They're actually very valuable. You can sell these on the underground for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Chien: Then we became more worried because immediately we discovered more zero days. And again, these zero days are extremely rare. Inside Stuxnet we had, you know, four zero days, and for the entire rest of the year, we only saw 12 zero days used. It blows all... everything else out of the water. We've never seen this before. Actually, we've never seen it since, either. Seeing one in a malware you could understand because, you know, the malware authors are making money, they're stealing people's credit cards and making money, so it's worth their while to use it, but seeing four zero days, could be worth half a million dollars right there, used in one piece of malware, this is not your ordinary criminal gangs doing this. This is... This is someone bigger. It's definitely not traditional crime, not hacktivists. Who else? It was evident on a very early stage that just given the sophistication of this malware... Suggested that there must have been a nation-state involved, at least one nation-state involved in the development. When we look at code that's coming from what appears to be a state attacker or state-sponsored attacker, usually they're scrubbed clean. They don't... they don't leave little bits behind. They don't leave little hints behind. But in Stuxnet there were actually a few hints left behind. One was that, in order to get low-level access to Microsoft Windows, Stuxnet needed to use a digital certificate, which certifies that this piece of code came from a particular company. Now, those attackers obviously couldn't go to Microsoft and say, "Hey, test our code out for us. And give us a digital certificate." So they essentially stole them... From two companies in Taiwan. And these two companies have nothing to do with each other except for their close proximity in the exact same business park. Digital certificates are guarded very, very closely behind multiple doors and they require multiple people to unlock. Security: ...To the camera. Chien: And they need to provide both biometrics - and, as well, pass phrases. It wasn't like those certificates were just sitting on some machine connected to the Internet. Some human assets had to be involved, spies. O'Murchu: Like a cleaner who comes in at night and has stolen these certificates from these companies. It did feel like walking onto the set of this James Bond movie and you... You've been embroiled in this thing that, you know, you... You never expected. We continued to search, and we continued to search in code, and eventually we found some other bread crumbs left we were able to follow. It was doing something with Siemens, Siemens software, possibly Siemens hardware. We'd never ever seen that in any malware before, something targeting Siemens. We didn't even know why they would be doing that. But after googling, very quickly we understood it was targeting Siemens PLCs. Stuxnet was targeting a very specific hardware device, something called a PLC or a programmable logic controller. Langner: The PLC is kind of a very small computer attached to physical equipment, like pumps, like valves, like motors. So this little box is running a digital program and the actions of this program turns that motor on, off, or sets a specific speed. Chien: Those program module controllers control things like power plants, power grids. O'Murchu: This is used in factories, it's used in critical infrastructure. Critical infrastructure, it's everywhere around us, transportation, telecommunications, financial services, health care. So the payload of Stuxnet was designed to attack some very important part of our world. The payload is gonna be important. What happens there could be very dangerous. Langner: The next very big surprise came when it infected our lab system. We figured out that the malware was probing for controllers. It was quite picky on its targets. It didn't try to manipulate any given controller in a network that it would see. It went through several checks, and when those checks failed, it would not implement the attack. It was obviously probing for a specific target. You've got to put this in context that, at the time, we already knew, well, this is the most sophisticated piece of malware that we have ever seen. So it's kind of strange. Somebody takes that huge effort to hit one specific target? Well, that must be quite a significant target. Chien: So at Symantec we have probes on networks all over the world watching for malicious activity. O'Murchu: We'd actually seen infections of Stuxnet all over the world, in the U.S., Australia, in the U.K., in France, Germany, all over Europe. Chien: It spread to any Windows machine in the entire world. You know, we had these organizations inside the United States who were in charge of industrial control facilities saying, "We're infected. What's gonna happen?" O'Murchu: We didn't know if there was a deadline coming up where this threat would trigger and suddenly would, like, turn off all, you know, electricity plants around the world or it would start shutting things down or launching some attack. We knew that Stuxnet could have very dire consequences, and we were very worried about what the payload contained and there was an imperative speed that we had to race and try and, you know, beat this ticking bomb. Eventually, we were able to refine the statistics a little and we saw that Iran was the number one infected country in the world. Chien: That immediately raised our eyebrows. We had never seen a threat before where it was predominantly in Iran. And so we began to follow what was going on in the geopolitical world, what was happening in the general news. And at that time, there were actually multiple explosions of gas pipelines going in and out of Iran. Unexplained explosions. O'Murchu: And of course, we did notice that at the time there had been assassinations of nuclear scientists. So that was worrying. We knew there was something bad happening. Gibney: Did you get concerned for yourself? I mean, did you begin to start looking over your shoulder from time to time? Yeah, definitely looking over my shoulder and... and being careful about what I spoke about on the phone. I was... pretty confident my conversations on my... On the phone were being listened to. We were only half joking when we would look at each other and tell each other things like, "Look, I'm not suicidal. If I show up dead on Monday, you know, it wasn't me." We'd been publishing information about Stuxnet all through that summer. And then in November, the industrial control system sort of expert in Holland contacted us... And he said all of these devices that would be inside of an industrial control system hold a unique identifier number that identified the make and model of that device. And we actually had a couple of these numbers in the code that we didn't know what they were. And so we realized maybe what he was referring to was the magic numbers we had. And then when we searched for those magic numbers in that context, we saw that what had to be connected to this industrial control system that was being targeted were something called frequency converters from two specific manufacturers, one of which was in Iran. And so at this time, we absolutely knew that the facility that was being targeted had to be in Iran and had equipment made from Iranian manufacturers. When we looked up those frequency converters, we immediately found out that they were actually export controlled by the nuclear regulatory commission. And that immediately lead us then to some nuclear facility. Gibney: This was more than a computer story, so I left the world of the antivirus detectives and sought out journalist, David Sanger, who specialized in the strange intersection of cyber, nuclear weapons, and espionage. Sanger: The emergence of the code is what put me on alert that an attack was under way. And because of the covert nature of the operation, not only were official government spokesmen unable to talk about it, they didn't even know about it. Eventually, the more I dug into it, the more I began to find individuals who had been involved in some piece of it or who had witnessed some piece of it. And that meant talking to Americans, talking to Israelis, talking to Europeans, because this was obviously the first, biggest, and most sophisticated example of a state or two states using a cyber weapon for offensive purposes. I came to this with a fair bit of history, understanding the Iranian nuclear program. How did Iran get its first nuclear reactor? We gave it to them... Under the Shah, because the Shah was considered an American ally. Thank you again for your warm welcome, Mr. President. Gary Samore: During the Nixon administration, the U.S. was very enthusiastic about supporting the Shah's nuclear power program. And at one point, the Nixon administration was pushing the idea that Pakistan and Iran should build a joint plant together in Iran. There's at least some evidence that the Shah was thinking about acquisition of nuclear weapons, because he saw, and we were encouraging him to see Iran as the so-called policemen of the Persian Gulf. And the Iranians have always viewed themselves as naturally the dominant power in the Middle East. Samore: But the revolution, which overthrew the Shah in '79, really curtailed the program before it ever got any head of steam going. Part of our policy against Iran after the revolution was to deny them nuclear technology. So most of the period when I was involved in the '80s and the '90s was the U.S. running around the world and persuading potential nuclear suppliers not to provide even peaceful nuclear technology to Iran. And what we missed was the clandestine transfer in the mid-1980s from Pakistan to Iran. Rolf Mowatt-Larssen: Abdul Qadeer Khan is what we would call the father of the Pakistan nuclear program. He had the full authority and confidence of the Pakistan government from its inception to the production of nuclear weapons. I was a CIA officer for... For... For over two decades, operations officer, worked overseas most of my career. The A.Q. Khan network is so notable because aside from building the Pakistani program for decades... It also was the means by which other countries were able to develop nuclear weapons, including Iran. Samore: A.Q. Khan acting on behalf of the Pakistani government negotiated with officials in Iran and then there was a transfer which took place through Dubai of blueprints for nuclear weapons design as well as some hardware. Throughout the mid-1980s, the Iranian program was not very well-resourced. It was more of an R & D program. It wasn't really until the mid-'90s that it started to take off when they made the decision to build the nuclear weapons program. You know, we can speculate what, in their mind, motivated them. I think it was the U.S. invasion of Iraq after Kuwait. You know, there was an eight-year war between Iraq and Iran, we had wiped out Saddam's forces in a matter of weeks. And I think that was enough to convince the rulers in Tehran that they needed to pursue nuclear weapons more seriously. George Bush: States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. Samore: From 2003 to 2005 when they feared that the U.S. would invade them, they accepted limits on their nuclear program. But by 2006, the Iranians had come to the conclusion that the U.S. was bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq and no longer had the capacity to threaten them, and so they felt it was safe to resume their enrichment program they started producing low enriched uranium, producing more centrifuges, installing them at the large-scale underground enrichment facility at Natanz. Gibney: How many times have you been to Natanz? Not that many, because I left few years ago, the IAEA, but I was there quite... Quite a few times. Natanz is just in the middle of the desert. When they were building it in secret, they were calling it desert irrigation facility. For the local people, you want to sell why you are building a big complex. There is a lot of artillery and air force. It's better protected against attack from air than any other nuclear installation I have seen. So this is deeply underground. But then inside, Natanz is like any other centrifuge facility. I have been all over the world, from Brazil to Russia, Japan, so they are all alike with their own features, their own centrifuges, their own culture, but basically, the process is the same. And so are the monitoring activities of the IAEA. There are basic principles. You want to see what goes in, what goes out, and then on top of that you make sure that it produces low enriched uranium instead of anything to do with the higher enrichments and nuclear weapon grade uranium. Emad Kiyaei: Iran's nuclear facilities are under 24-hour watch of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Every single gram of Iranian fissile material... is accounted for. They have, like, basically seals they put on fissile materials. There are IAEA seals. You can't break it without getting noticed. Heinonen: When you look at the uranium which was there in Natanz, it was a very special uranium. This is called Isotope 236, and that was a puzzle to us, because you only see this sort of uranium in states which have had nuclear weapons. We realized that they had cheated us. This sort of equipment has been bought from what they call a black market. They never pointed out it to A.Q. Khan at that point of time. What I was surprised was the sophistication and the quality control and the way they have the manufacturing was really professional. It was not something, you know, you just create in a few months' time. This was a result of a long process. A centrifuge, you feed uranium gas in and you have a cascade, thousands of centrifuges, and from the other end you get enriched uranium out. It separates uranium based on spinning the rotors. It spins so fast, 300 meters per second, the same as the velocity of sound. These are tremendous forces and as a result, the rotor, it twists, looks like a banana at one point of time. So it has to be balanced because any small vibration it will blow up. And here comes another trouble. You have to raise the temperature but this very thin rotor was... They are made from carbon fiber, and the other pieces, they are made from metal. When you heat carbon fiber, it shrinks. When you heat metal, it expands. So you need to balance not only that they spin, they twist, but this temperature behavior in such a way that it doesn't break. So this has to be very precise. This is what makes them very difficult to manufacture. You can model it, you can calculate it, but at the very end, it's actually based on practice and experience. So it's a... It's a piece of art, so to say. Heinonen: Iranians are very proud of their centrifuges. They have a lot of public relations videos given up always in April when they have what they call a national nuclear day. Kiyaei: Ahmadinejad came into his presidency saying if the international community wants to derail us we will stand up to it. If they want us to sign more inspections and more additional protocols and other measures, no, we will not. We will fight for our rights. Iran is a signature to nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and under that treaty, Iran has a right to a nuclear program. We can have enrichment. Who are you, world powers, to come and tell us that we cannot have enrichment? This was his mantra, and it galvanized the public. Sanger: By 2007, 2008, the U.S. government was in a very bad place with the Iranian program. President Bush recognized that he could not even come out in public and declare that the Iranians were building a nuclear weapon, because by this time, he had gone through the entire WMD fiasco in Iraq. He could not really take military action. Condoleezza Rice said to him at one point, "You know, Mr. President, I think you've invaded your last Muslim country, even for the best of reasons." He didn't want to let the Israelis conduct a military operation. It's 1938, and Iran is Germany and it's racing... To arm itself with atomic bombs. Iran's nuclear ambitions must be stopped. They have to be stopped. We all have to stop it, now. That's the one message I have for you today. - Thank you. Israel was saying they were gonna bomb Iran. And the government here in Washington did all sorts of scenarios about what would happen if that Israeli attack occurred. They were all very ugly scenarios. Our belief was that if they went on their own knowing the limitations... No, they're a very good air force, all right? But it's small and the distances are great and the target's disbursed and hardened, all right? If they would have attempted a raid on a military plane, we would have been assuming that they were assuming we would finish that which they started. In other words, there would be many of us in government thinking that the purpose of the raid wasn't to destroy the Iranian nuclear system, but the purpose of the raid was to put us at war with Iran. Israel is very much concerned about Iran's nuclear program, more than the United States. It's only natural because of the size of the country, because we live in this neighborhood, America lives thousands and thousands miles away from Iran. The two countries agreed on the goal. There is no page between us that Iran should not have a nuclear military capability. There are some differences on how to... How to achieve it and when action is needed. Yadlin: We are taking very seriously leaders of countries who call to the destruction and annihilation of our people. If Iran will get nuclear weapons, now or in the future... It means that for the first time in human history Islamic zealots, religious zealots, will get their hand on the most dangerous, devastating weapons, and the world should prevent this. Samore: The Israelis believe that the Iranian leadership has already made the decision to build nuclear weapons when they think they can get away with it. The view in the U.S. is that the Iranians haven't made that final decision yet. To me, that doesn't make any difference. I mean, it really doesn't make any difference, and it's probably unknowable, unless you can put, you know, supreme leader Khamenei on the couch and interview him. I think, you know, from our standpoint, stopping Iran from getting the threshold capacity is, you know, the primary policy objective. Once they have the fissile material, once they have the capacity to produce nuclear weapons, then the game is lost. Hayden: President Bush once said to me, he said, "Mike, I don't want any president ever to be faced with only two options, bombing or the bomb." Right? He... He wanted options that... That made it... Made it far less likely he or his successor or successors would ever get to that point where that's... That's all you've got. We wanted to be energetic enough in pursuing this problem that... that the Israelis would certainly believe, "Yeah, we get it." The intelligence cooperation between Israel and the United States is very, very good. And therefore, the Israelis went to the Americans and said, "Okay, guys, you don't …