Intelligence community officials being pressed by Senate Intelligence Committee members are backtracking on their assessments from the latest National Intelligence Estimate, admitting that the phrasing and emphasis of the leaked portions of the NIE made public in December led to conclusions that were misleading if not directly at odds with reality. Let's hope it leads to a national sobering up regarding the intentions of the Iranian regime, and that the damage done by this transparent political stunt isn't irreparable.
WASHINGTON — The director of national intelligence is backing away from his agency's assessment late last year that Iran had halted its nuclear program, saying he wishes he had written the unclassified version of the document in a different manner.At a hearing yesterday of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the intelligence director, Michael McConnell, said, "If I had 'til now to think about it, I probably would change a few things." He later added, "I would change the way we describe the Iranian nuclear program. I would have included that there are the component parts, that the portion of it, maybe the least significant, had halted.
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The release of the December 2007 estimate at best delayed American diplomatic efforts to pass a third U.N. Security Council resolution sanctioning Iran's uranium enrichment, an activity the mullahs have continued for two years despite warnings from all five permanent members of the security council. The estimate also drew rare rebukes from American allies, including Israel, France, and the United Kingdom who said their intelligence agencies did not concur with the American assessment that Iran had frozen its plan to produce an A-bomb.
The release of the declassified estimate also contradicted Mr. McConnell's own stated policy of keeping intelligence estimates secret. On Tuesday he said that on November 27, when his analysts presented him with the new Iran estimate, he decided he had to make the conclusions public because both he and his predecessor had been on record warning of Iran's nuclear weapons program and the new intelligence in part contradicted that.
With more on the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Kenneth Timmerman writes:
Sen. Kit Bond, the ranking Republican on the committee, chided McConnell for allowing the NIE to be used as a “political football,†and pointed out that the real revelation of the NIE was just the opposite of how it has been portrayed in news accounts at home and abroad.“The main news of the NIE was the confirmation that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, not that it had halted it temporarily,†he said.
Even the presumed, temporary halt was open to question, Bond added. “The French defense minister said publicly that he believes the program has restarted. Now if our government comes to that assessment, then we have set ourselves up to release another NIE or leak intelligence, because this last one has given us a false sense of security.â€
John Bolton, the former undersecretary of state for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, blasted McConnell and the NIE on the morning of the hearing in a sharply-worded oped appearing in The Wall Street Journal.
“Few seriously doubt that the NIE gravely damaged the Bush administration’s diplomatic strategy,†Bolton wrote.
The NIE was driven by policy considerations, not actual intelligence, and put the community’s credibility and impartiality on the line, Bolton argued.
I'm not aware of too many people who have been comforted by any sort of "sense of security" as regards Iran's intentions, since snippets of the latest NIE were selectively leaked (and selectively hyped by a gleeful media). George Bush's political opponents, who profess to prefer sanctions to any military options, have managed to make effective sanctions less likely than ever by playing politics with intelligence. More from Timmerman:
McConnell tried to dismiss Bolton’s comments, then began to seriously back-pedal.Once he realized that the intelligence community had turned up information that directly contradicted public statements he and his predecessor, John Negroponte, had made about Iran’s nuclear weapons program, McConnell said he was in a bind.
“So now my dilemma was, I could not not make this unclassified,†he said, even though his preference had been to keep the entire 140 page estimate out of the public eye.
Senior Bush administration officials who have read the entire classified NIE have told Newsmax they were “appalled†at the thin sourcing and shoddy analysis.
A former career CIA analyst commented, “I have never seen an intelligence analysis this bad. It is misleading, politicized, and poorly written.â€
In a column entitled “Stupid Intelligence on Iran,†the former defense secretary, James Schlesinger, wrote, “Clearly, the key judgments in the NIE were overstated . . . and thus incautiously phrased.â€
With the liberal celebratory back-slapping over with, and the President having been handed a political rebuke (national security be damned) it's encouraging that responsible people are publicly admitting that virtually no one actually believes the mullahs have voluntarily ended their drive to achieve nuclear weapons.
In his recent article in Commentary, Norman Podhoretz reprises an earlier piece making the case for a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. Both articles are worth considering in light of the increasing sobriety on the matter of Iranian nukes. He recalls the NIE of 2005, which predicted that...
....it was “unlikely... that Iran would be able to make a nuclear weapon....before early-to-mid next decadeâ€â€”that is, between 2010 and 2015. If that assessment, offered with “moderate confidence,†was correct, Bush would be off the hook, since he would be out of office for two years at the very least by the time the decision on whether or not to order air strikes would have to be made. That being the case, for the remainder of his term he could continue along the carrot-and-stick path, while striving to ratchet up the pressure on Iran with stronger and stronger measures that he could hope against hope might finally do the trick. If he could get these through the Security Council, so much the better; if not, the United States could try to assemble a coalition outside the UN that would be willing to impose really tough sanctions.
But one problem then as ever, was that taking effective action depended on the CIA being right, and as Podhoretz briefly recounts, the CIA's track record is appallingly bad when it comes to the big things:
...only by relying on the accuracy of the 2005 NIE would Bush be able in all good conscience to pass on to his successor the decision of whether or when to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities. But that estimate, as he could hardly help knowing from the CIA’s not exactly brilliant track record, might easily be too optimistic.To start with the most spectacular recent instance, the CIA had failed to anticipate 9/11. It then turned out to be wrong in 2002 about Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, very likely because it was bending over backward to compensate for having been wrong in exactly the opposite direction in 1991, when at the end of the first Gulf war the IAEA discovered that the Iraqi nuclear program was far more advanced than the CIA had estimated.
Podhoretz then turns to an excerpt from Gabriel Schoenfeld to continue the narrative:
The CIA was established in 1947 in large measure to avoid another surprise attack like the one the U.S. had suffered on December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor. But only three years after its founding, the fledgling agency missed the outbreak of the Korean war. It then failed to understand that the Chinese would come to the aid of the North Koreans if American forces crossed the Yalu river. It missed the outbreak of the Suez war in 1956. In September 1962, the CIA issued an NIE which stated that the “Soviets would not introduce offensive missiles in Cubaâ€; in short order, the USSR did precisely that. In 1968 it failed to foresee the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. . . . It did not inform Jimmy Carter that the Soviet Union would invade Afghanistan in 1979.
Podhoretz continues
...This is not to mention perhaps the most notorious case of all: the fiasco, known as the Bay of Pigs, produced by the CIA’s wildly misplaced confidence that an invasion of Cuba by the army of exiles it had assembled and trained would set off a popular uprising against the Castro regime.On Bush’s part, then, deep skepticism was warranted concerning the CIA’s estimate of how much time we had before Iran reached the point of no return.
Sleep tight...the CIA is on the case.
Do read the whole Podhoretz article. He goes on to argue that doing nothing to deter Iran, which is our present course with the military option effectively off the table and the sanctions option thus defanged, virtually assures a nuclear exchange in the not too distant future, with a regime sworn to Israel's destruction and ideologically immune to any "mutually assured destruction" deterrent moving resolutely toward their goal.
Related:
U.S. Warns Iran over Nuclear Centrifuges
Correcting the CIA - NY Sun op-ed
Posted by dan at February 8, 2008 2:06 AM