Thursday - December 06, 2007

Who ya gonna believe, the MSM or John Bolton?

Rarely has a document from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the “intelligence community” on issues such as Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly.

All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than “intelligence” analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it. President Bush may not be able to repair his Iran policy (which was not rigorous enough to begin with) in his last year, but he would leave a lasting legacy by returning the intelligence world to its proper function.

I question the timing of this NIE document ...

Consider these flaws in the NIE’s “key judgments,” which were made public even though approximately 140 pages of analysis, and reams of underlying intelligence, remain classified.

First, the headline finding—that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003—is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran’s nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between “military” and “civilian” programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran’s “civilian” program that posed the main risk of a nuclear “breakout.”

The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs’ motives and objectives. The current NIE freely admits to having only moderate confidence that the suspension continues and says that there are significant gaps in our intelligence and that our analysts dissent from their initial judgment on suspension. This alone should give us considerable pause.

many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department, brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national intelligence. These officials had relatively benign views of Iran’s nuclear intentions five and six years ago; now they are writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high. In fact, these are precisely the policy biases they had before, recycled as “intelligence judgments.”

What, you mean all the Clintonistas that got kicked out of State not only still have jobs, they’re now playing Secret Squirrel^tm with classified intel?

That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling. While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this “intelligence” torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were. Ironically, the NIE opens the way for Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.

Well, no kidding. I’ve read elsewhere that this NIE report, and the instant spin the MSM put on it, have effectively pulled off a foreign policy coupe against Bush. We will take no action whatsoever against the Mad Mullahs for the remainder of W’s time in office. By which point they will have the bomb, guaranteed.

Go read the rest of the article.


Why the heck isn’t JB running for President or at least making GOP stump speeches? He looks like the only Repub with a spine in all of DC. Of the whole damn GOP, I trust him and Newt and Scalia. And Fred, a little. That’s about it.

The proper way to read this report is through the lens of the long struggle the professional intelligence community has been waging against the elected civilian administration in Washington. They have opposed President Bush on nearly every major policy decision. They were against the Iraqi National Congress. They were against elections in Iraq. They were against I. Lewis Libby. They are against a tough line on Iran.

One could call all this revenge of the bureaucrats. Vann Van Diepen, one of the estimate’s main authors, has spent the last five years trying to get America to accept Iran’s right to enrich uranium. Mr. Van Diepen no doubt reckons that in helping push the estimate through the system, he has succeeded in influencing the policy debate in Washington. The bureaucrats may even think they are stopping another war.

Our own “confidence” is not heightened by the fact that the NIE’s main authors include three former State Department officials with previous reputations as “hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials,” according to an intelligence source. They are Tom Fingar, formerly of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Vann Van Diepen, the National Intelligence Officer for WMD; and Kenneth Brill, the former U.S. Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The U.S. also knows that Iran has extensive technical information on how to fit a warhead atop a ballistic missile. And there is considerable evidence that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps has been developing the detonation devices needed to set off a nuclear explosion at the weapons testing facility in Parchin. Even assuming that Iran is not seeking a bomb right now, it is hardly reassuring that they are developing technologies that could bring them within a screw’s twist of one.

Pajamas Media weighs in

The most interesting part of the “Estimate” is of course its political and policy implications, which National Security Adviser Steven Hadley was quick to spell out. In his view, and in that of many political leaders and pundits, if Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program, there is no great urgency to move against the mullahs.

his sort of blatant unprofessionalism is as common in today’s Washington as it is unworthy of a serious intel type, and I think it tells us a lot about the document itself.

The Philadelphia Inquirer wonders where the missing (redacted?) paragraph is that explains things:

There’s lots to wonder about in the Key Judgments of the latest National Intelligence Estimate, which informs us with “high confidence” that Iran halted its nuclear bomb program four years ago. This contradicts its 2005 warning that Iran was “determined to develop nuclear weapons.” That followed the 2003-2004 zig-zag from our intelligence community on Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s interest in weapons of mass destruction; which followed the intelligence failure to zero in on the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers before they slammed airplanes into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania.

Would you buy a used car from our spooks?

But let us assume that their new report is correct - at least until its consensus, distilled from the bureaucracies of 16 U.S. agencies, might be contradicted by the next intelligence reversal (or perhaps an Iranian nuclear test). Let us assume, as our spies now estimate, that Iran’s government had a nuclear weapons program running for years, but in late 2003, “primarily in response to international pressure,” brought it to a halt.

That brings us to what I would call the crucial, missing paragraph in this report. If international pressure achieved such sterling results in Iran four years ago, then surely we deserve to know what, exactly, impressed Iran’s rulers so thoroughly that they might have slammed on the brakes. This the National Intelligence Estimate does not explain.

Was it diplomacy? In 2003, the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency was still pondering and dithering over Iran’s nuclear program, unwilling until 2005 even to refer the matter for action to the Security Council - where no action was taken until the watered-down sanctions imposed in 2006. Also in 2003, the European Union began a series of talks with Iran so limp that they dragged on for years with no verifiable results beyond nose-thumbing from Tehran. I’d suggest, with high confidence, that crediting the EU or the U.N. with having corralled Iran four years ago would be ridiculous.

Iran’s regime has a long record of deceit, terror and murder. In choosing the tools to stop Tehran from taking these tactics nuclear, Americans need honest assessments of what works - and what doesn’t. If our intelligence experts are now writing our military overthrow of Hussein out of their history books as irrelevant to whatever calculations they now suggest took place in Iran that same year, it’s time for less official consensus, and a lot more common sense.

This intelligence report cheats Americans.

I’m sure you can find other voices of patriotic dissent without much effort. It’s a con people, don’t buy it.

Posted by Drew458     on 12/06/2007 at 01:06 PM   
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