May 19, 2008 • Vol. 13, No. 34
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Earlier today Joscelyn noted the word games being played over Saddam's connection to terrorist groups, specifically Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which later merged with al Qaeda. In his latest book, Cheney, Steve Hayes recounted one such incidence:
In 2002, the vice president had been briefed on fresh intelligence that members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad had made their way to Iraq and had begun setting up safe houses in Baghdad. Cheney found the report interesting, but odd. He had understood that Egyptian Islamic Jihad had merged with al Qaeda several years earlier. Ayman al Zawahiri, the group’s longtime leader, was now Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy. Cheney wanted to know why the report did not simply conclude that al Qaeda was setting up safe houses in Baghdad.
He returned the report to the CIA with a question: Would it be accurate to substitute “al Qaeda” for every mention of “Egyptian Islamic Jihad?” The answer did not come immediately, but when it did, the CIA finally acknowledged that members of al Qaeda were operating in Baghdad.
To Cheney, the episode was one example of many that demonstrated the unwillingness of some CIA analysts to take an objective look at Iraq and its support for radical Islamic terrorists, al Qaeda in particular. In this case, analysts were so determined to avoid reporting the presence of al Qaeda members in Iraq that they presented Cheney with a less-than-accurate description of the situation in Baghdad.
Who was that CIA agent playing word games with Cheney anyway?
In the middle of a long and fascinating piece on his regrets about the Iraq War, former New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg, now with the Atlantic Monthly, discusses the new Institute for Defense Analyses report on Iraq and Terrorism. Unlike, virtually every other reporter, he appears to have read it. "Before the war," he writes, "I believed that Saddam was a supporter of terrorist groups."
The report on Saddam's terrorist ties released last week by the Joint Forces Command confirms this (not that you would know it from the scant press coverage of the study). The study, citing captured Iraqi documents, indicates that Saddam's regime supported various jihadist groups, including Ayman al-Zawahiri's, and including Kurdish Islamist groups, about whom I have reported. But read the study for yourself; it's actually quite an achievement of translation and analysis.
As he indicates, Goldberg is not new to the subject. (It's telling that those who have written about Saddam Hussein's support for jihadist terror are encouraging people to read the actual report for themselves.) Before the war, he wrote two articles about Iraq and terrorism and the IDA study confirms several elements of his reporting.
In the first, Goldberg wrote that he learned about one al Qaeda connection "while I was interviewing Al Qaeda operatives in a Kurdish prison in Sulaimaniya. There, a man whom Kurdish intelligence officials identified as a captured Iraqi agent told me that in 1992 he served as a bodyguard to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy, when Zawahiri secretly visited Baghdad."
His name was Qassem Hussein Mohammed. He told Goldberg that his involvement in Islamic radicalism began in 1992 in Baghdad, when he met Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Qassem said that he was one of seventeen bodyguards assigned to protect Zawahiri, who stayed at Baghdad's Al Rashid Hotel, but who, he said, moved around surreptitiously. The guards had no idea why Zawahiri was in Baghdad, but one day Qassem escorted him to one of Saddam's palaces for what he later learned was a meeting with Saddam himself.
When Goldberg first reported this it drew skepticism from intelligence officials who had long believed that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would not work with Islamic radicals like Zawahiri, now Osama bin Ladens chief deputy. We now know from a captured Iraqi regime document dated March 18, 1993, that Zawahiris Egyptian Islamic Jihad had been receiving support from Saddam for at least two years.
According to the studys authors: Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda -- such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri -- or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives.
Goldberg also reported extensively on the links between Saddams regime and al Qaeda affiliates in Kurdistan.
Continue reading "Still More Journalistic Sanity on Iraq and al Qaeda" »
John Hinderaker at Power Line writes, "…our principal news media outlets have fabricated an alternative reality around the Iraq war by simply misreporting the facts." That’s true, especially with regards to Saddam’s terror ties. And, as Power Line has noted on a number of occasions, the media has gotten a lot of help from partisan members of the U.S. Intelligence Community (both current and former).
Take, for example, this recent column by Michael Isikoff of Newsweek concerning the Iraqi Perspectives Project’s recently released study of Saddam’s intelligence files. You would never know from Isikoff’s piece that the report contains documents linking Saddam’s regime to six terrorist groups that are all part of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist empire, including two groups that form the core of al Qaeda. Nor, would you know that Saddam’s regime cooperated with these groups at various times. Instead, all you’ll find is spin.
The spin is provided by Paul Pillar, a former high-ranking analyst at the CIA who has made his anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war inclinations known. Pillar has spun tale after tale about Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda. He is heavily invested in the notion that Saddam’s "secular" regime did not work with the Islamists of al Qaeda. Pillar is, quite clearly, a man with an agenda. Here are the most relevant lines from Isikoff’s piece:
The report did find plenty of evidence that Saddam's regime had close ties to other (mainly Palestinian) terror groups and had maintained contacts with some radical Islamic movements-including, according to one 1993 document, Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Last week Vice President Dick Cheney said the document showed there was a "link between Iraq and Al Qaeda." But Pillar notes the Egyptian group-headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri-didn't merge with Al Qaeda until years later. "This is the same kind of word game they played before the war," Pillar says.
This is nonsense. Pillar is pretending that because Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad (the "EIJ") had not formally merged with bin Laden until 1998 or 2001 (depending on who you talk to) that a connection between Saddam and the EIJ doesn’t represent a link to al Qaeda. On the contrary, as I pointed out in a recent post over at Power Line, Zawahiri and the EIJ began to work closely with bin Laden in the mid-1980’s--long before their formal merger. Numerous sources, including Zawahiri’s lawyer in Egypt, Montasser al-Zayyat, have reported on the long-standing relationship. Lawrence Wright has also provided numerous details in his reporting for the New Yorker and in his book The Looming Tower.
A clear pattern emerges from the available evidence: Zawahiri and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad were major influences on Osama bin Laden early on, long before their formal merger. There were, of course, tactical differences from time to time, but this never stopped the two groups from working hand-in-glove. In fact, as Wright, al-Zayyat, and other sources have reported, it was Zawahiri and his EIJ lieutenants who steered bin Laden towards the absolute jihadist approach that defines al Qaeda. They were, in fact, always as much a part of al Qaeda as bin Laden himself. It is highly significant, therefore, that the IIS document Pillar and Isikoff refer to says that the IIS and the EIJ had an agreement in place to collude against Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt. (Subsequent documents show that Saddam wanted the EIJ to focus on hunting Americans in Somalia. I’ll have more on this in the near future.)
The evidence is rather unambiguous in this regard. So, we are left with two options: (1) Pillar doesn’t know this, or (2) He is spinning this story to serve his own agenda. Either way, Isikoff’s blind reliance on Pillar to dismiss this important connection between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda does not inspire confidence. Of course, as Robert Novak has reported, Isikoff has relied heavily on Pillar in the past.
Continue reading "Who's Playing Word Games?" »
Michael Rubin has a good write-up at the Corner. I covered this yesterday here, but what I didn't know until reading Rubin:
To support dismissing President Bush’s stated concerns, they cite Joseph Cirincione. Fair enough, but wouldn't basic integrity mandate that they mention that Cirincione is not a disinterested analyst, but rather is advising Barack Obama?
That would seem like useful information for the Post to include. Instead, Cirincione is identified merely as an "expert on Iran and nuclear proliferation." His expert opinion: Bush's comments were "as uninformed as [Sen. John] McCain's statement that Iran is training al-Qaeda." That sounds objective...
Bush spoke directly to the Iranian people yesterday in an address broadcast over Radio Farda:
"[The Iranian government has] declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people -- some in the Middle East. And that's unacceptable to the United States, and it's unacceptable to the world..."
For some reason the Washington Post's Robin Wright took exception to this statement:
But most striking was Bush's accusation that Iran has openly declared its nuclear weapons intentions, even though a National Intelligence Estimate concluded in December that Iran had stopped its weapons program in 2003, a major reversal in the long-standing U.S. assessment.
Robin Wright seems to have taken a break from this story for the last few months, since anybody who's been following it knows that it's not the president who has recast the NIE, but the intelligence community. In an interview with WTOP on February 26 of this year, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell explained:
As you know, there’s been confusion about what Iranian intentions are with regard to nuclear weapons. You know from our National Intelligence Estimate we released, we highlighted the fact that a specific portion of the program had been cancelled, and that was the technical design of the warhead.
What I’d just highlight for you is there are three parts to a nuclear-weapons program. First, you have to have fissile material. Second, you have a nuclear-weapons warhead design; and third, a means of delivery of that warhead, given that you had such a warhead. And what we highlighted that was cancelled was the specifics on the warhead design. They are still pursuing fissile material – which that is the most difficult challenge in a nuclear program. And they’re still doing the ballistic missile design and testing, which is probably the second-most difficult part.
It is an open question as to whether Iran has since restarted work on the warhead design. Regardless, given their progress in producing the fissile material, Iran could produce a workable nuclear device in "6 months to 12 months," according to testimony by McConnell to the House Intelligence Committee on February 7.
Also, in order to contradict the president's statement, Wright quotes Joseph Cirincione, a highly partisan "expert." Cirincione says "Iran has never said it wanted a nuclear weapon for any reason. It's just not true." So Wright's attack boils down to little more than the fact that the Iranians themselves haven't fessed up (despite talk of wiping Israel off the map and the "accidental" discovery of blueprints for a nuclear warhead during an IAEA inspection of an Iranian facility). Of course Cirincione takes a rather laissez faire view of proliferation. Last fall, when the Israelis took out what was widely reported to be a North Korean nuclear facility inside Syria, Cirincione told Foreign Policy magazine that "if North Korea gave them [the Syrians] anything short of nuclear weapons it is of little consequence." Perhaps he thinks that, likewise, until the Iranians actually assemble the device, it is of little consequence.
Other experts take a different view. One such is Gary Samore, a top arms control official in the Clinton administration and a director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, who told the Los Angeles Times in December that "The halting of the weaponization program in 2003 is less important from a proliferation standpoint than resumption of the enrichment program in 2006." You wouldn't know it from Wright's piece, but this view represents something of a consensus within the intel community as demonstrated by McConnell's statements over the past few months. Bush was simply stating the obvious, even if Robin Wright, Joseph Cirincione, and Mahmoud Ammadinejad don't agree with the assessment.
The Washington Post reports on the difficulties Western intelligence agencies face in infiltrating al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. The piece notes that fresh recruits are often "highly disposable," employed mainly as suicide bombers and general cannon fodder, making it difficult for informants to penetrate the networks. It also notes that those informants who do work their way up risk being exposed by the civilian justice system:
In January, Spanish police arrested 14 men in Barcelona who they suspected were preparing to bomb subways in cities across Europe. Investigators disclosed in court documents that the arrests had been prompted by a Pakistani informant working for French intelligence.
The revelation infuriated French officials, who were forced to withdraw the informant -- a rare example of an agent who had successfully infiltrated training camps in Pakistan. Spanish authorities expressed regret but said they had no choice; after they failed to find bombs or much other evidence during the arrests, the case rested largely on the informant's word.
This is why terrorists can't necessarily be allowed to see all the evidence against them. But it is problematic. What if 14 foreign nationals were arrested on American soil under similar circumstances? Would the federal government jeopardize a highly placed informant inside al Qaeda--one who had demonstrated his worth by averting at least one attack--for the sake of meeting the same standards applied in prosecuting mobsters?
So Think Progress went batty when McCain, earlier this week, said that Iran was "taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back." Today, they continue to pound away on this issue by quoting a statement made by Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno last summer:
We don’t see any evidence, significant evidence, that shows that [Iranian-controlled] groups that are funding and providing arms to Shi’a extremists are directly related to al Qaeda. Now, we all know that al Qaeda uses Iran and they do in some cases traffic some of their individuals through Iran to Iraq, but it’s a very small number of people and it’s mostly through the Kurdish regions up north, where you have the old Ansar al-Sunna connections. But beyond that, there is no specific connection between the Shi’a extremists — excuse me — the [Iranian] Quds Force operations and supporting the Shi’a extremists and that of al Qaeda, and supporting al Qaeda.
Am I missing something, or isn't that exactly what McCain said? And since no one is disputing that Iran has control over its borders, we are now talking about degrees of support, which is to say, Iran is supporting al Qaeda, we just don't know to what extent.
As Steve Hayes and I have previously discussed, the new IPP study documents the relationship between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Ayman al Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad ("EIJ"). It is worth reproducing the language from the IPP study in this regard once again: "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives."
Indeed, this is a very important fact. Zawahiri has worked closely with Osama bin Laden since the mid-1980’s, when both terror chieftains were organizing and directing recruits for the jihad in Afghanistan. Zawahiri and other Egyptian terrorists, in particular Sheikh Omar abd al-Rahman (aka the "Blind Sheikh"), played instrumental roles in al Qaeda’s evolution. Most likely, al Qaeda would not have become nearly as effective without them. Almost all of the key roles inside al Qaeda were filled by EIJ members early on, and the EIJ remains at the core of al Qaeda to this day. It is no exaggeration to say that Zawahiri is as much a part of al Qaeda as Osama bin Laden himself.
But there is more to the story of Saddam’s relationship with the EIJ. If you take a closer look at one of the documents the IPP study relies upon, you will find that Saddam agreed to work with not only Zawahiri’s EIJ, but also, more broadly, the so-called "Afghan Arabs"--the veterans of the Afghanistan jihad against the Soviets who made up almost the entire first generation of al Qaeda--in general. (Of course, the EIJ’s members were themselves "Arab Afghans.")
The key is the January 25, 1993 memo from the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) to Saddam that I discussed in my first post in this series. Recall that just one week earlier, on January 18, Saddam had ordered his minions to use terrorists to "hunt" the Americans throughout the Muslim world, and especially in Somalia. One of the groups the IIS identified as capable of fulfilling this mission was Zawahiri’s EIJ.
According to the January 25 memo, Iraqi Intelligence had recently met with a leading figure in Sudan’s ruling National Islamic Front party, Sheikh Ali ‘Uthman Taha. It was Taha who negotiated a renewal of the relationship between Saddam’s Iraq, on the one hand, and Zawahiri and the Blind Sheikh’s sister organizations on the other. Sudan was then playing host to the Arab Afghans.
Continue reading "Reading Saddam's Intelligence Files, Part 5: The Arab Afghans" »
Eli Lake, whose been covering this issue for years, reports for the New York Sun:
Mr. McCain's national security adviser, Randy Scheunemann, told The New York Sun, "There is ample documentation that Iran has provided many different forms of support to Sunni extremists, including Al Qaeda as well as Shi'ia extremists in Iraq. It would require a willing suspension of disbelief to deny Iran supports Al Qaeda in Iraq."
Responding to Mr. Scheunemann's remarks, a senior foreign policy adviser to Senator Obama, Susan Rice, yesterday told the Sun, "It's very bizarre." She noted that Mr. McCain had "made the same statement three times in as many days. Surely he must know, as Senator Lieberman reminded him, that Iran is not engaged with Al Qaeda in Iraq. I don't know if he is confused, or is he cynically trying to conflate Al Qaeda and Iran as Cheney and Bush did Al Qaeda and Iraq in 2002 and 2003?"
Ms. Rice stipulated in the interview that she was not saying Iran and Al Qaeda have never worked together, but that "there is no body of evidence to suggest Iran is aiding Al Qaeda in Iraq."
Rice echoes what Brian Katulis of the left-wing Center for American Progress said yesterday, calling the intelligence on this a "gray area." Likewise, Rice won't say that Iran and al Qaeda don't work together, so it's hard to see what all the fuss is about. And whatever relationship exists, Iran isn't going to advertise it. In this gray area, the Obama camp leans one way (assuming our enemies don't collaborate) and the McCain camp leans another (assuming they do). Fact of the matter is that what little evidence exists suggests they do work together--and of course when they don't work together there will be no evidence. If Obama makes it to the White House, he can raise the issue with Ahmadinejad during their summit at Camp David--I'm sure he'll get a straight answer (maybe there really is no al Qaeda, or homosexuality, in Iran).
With the ongoing imbroglio over Senator McCain’s comments linking Iran and al Qaeda, it is worth reviewing what Saddam’s own files have to say about Iran’s support for al Qaeda. Not only do Saddam’s Intelligence files confirm that his regime had a significant relationship with al Qaeda, but they also provide more evidence of Iran’s hand in al Qaeda’s terror. Some may say this is impossible: How could two states that hated each other as much as Saddam’s Iraq and the mullah’s Iran support the same terrorist group(s)? However, such thinking is very narrow-minded.
The IPP study proposes that we think of our terrorist enemies as cartels. In this sense, each of these parties competes in some important ways, but they are also capable of collaborating when it suits their interests. The IPP’s paradigm for understanding terrorism is very similar to the one Michael Ledeen proposed in his book, The War Against the Terror Masters. Ledeen has proposed that our terrorist enemies are best compared to rival mafia families, who can bitterly fight one another only to band together when facing a common foe, like law enforcement agencies. James Woolsey, the former head of the CIA, has proposed a similar way of understanding modern Islamic terrorism as well. For Woolsey, terrorist organizations and their sponsors are capable of forming "joint ventures" to fulfill their common interests--e.g. attacking Americans.
Numerous examples of such collaboration can be found throughout the history of Middle Eastern and Islamic terrorism. For example, Yasser Arafat and his PLO allied with both Iraq and Iran at various points throughout Arafat’s terrorist career. Hamas, a terrorist group which is the ideological cousin of al Qaeda and likewise an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, has drawn support from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and previously Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Today, the Sunni Hamas is strongly allied with Iran. And the man who served as Osama bin Laden’s protector and mentor from 1991 through mid-1996, Hassan al-Turabi, was quite open about his relationships with both Saddam Hussein (who he called a "close" ally) and the Iranian Mullahs. Turabi turned his Sudan into a melting pot of terrorism, bringing together disparate groups under a common anti-Western, anti-American banner. (See here and here for my two part series on Turabi.) This does not mean that Saddam’s Iraq and Iran necessarily had to cooperate with each other (although they did when it came to illicit deals under the oil-for-food program), just that each was capable of supporting terrorist groups that shared their immediate interests.
Continue reading "Reading Saddam’s Intelligence Files, Part 4: Iran & al Qaeda" »
Accompanying the IPP report were four volumes of backup materials. In all, the five total volumes contain more than 2,000 pages of documents, translations and other related materials, which are collectively housed in the so-called Harmony Database. The database contains a massive warehouse of materials collected in post-Saddam Iraq. Many of the documents contained in the four backup volumes were not discussed in the first volume of the IPP report, which was the actual study produced by the Institute for Defense Analyses.
One of those documents is a provocative letter from the Iraqi embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. Dated January 17, 2003, the letter is addressed to Iraq’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its subject is listed as "Al-Qa’eda Activities." Here is the relevant portion of the U.S. government’s translation of the document:
Attached is a report, furnished by source code number 6841, which includes the following:
1- Al-Qa’eda dispatched elements and personnel with fake passports to Arabic Countries under fictitious [sic] alias to target American interests in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain.
2- The Yemeni (Abu-Muhammad) was sent to Algeria carrying a passport with the name Saydi Ahmed Habiballah, to contact the Algerian "Salafist group for the calling of Jihad" and deliver money to them; however he was killed in an armed skirmish between Algerian security forces and the above-mentioned group. Algerian authorities were able to trace his real name and his families [sic] address in cooperation with the Yemeni embassy in Algeria. His real name is (‘Imad ‘Abdul-Wahid Rahman ‘Ulwan) from the "Ta’iz" village and he was a member of Al-Qa’eda.
A careful reading of the translated letter raises a number of questions and observations:
• What was contained in the "report, furnished by source code number 6841"? The volume of documents produced as part of the study does not contain a copy of the actual report, which was apparently included with the letter. Only a copy of the translated cover letter was included. Does the U.S. government have a copy of the actual report too? Or, is it missing? If the government does have a copy of the full report, what does it say?
• Why does source 6841 know so much about al Qaeda’s activities? It is possible that 6841 was an Iraqi spy tasked with monitoring al Qaeda on behalf of the Iraqi regime. But if that is the case, then Iraq had a particularly well-placed mole. Not only did he know that al Qaeda had sent terrorists to three different countries "to target American interests," but he also knew that one al Qaeda member had been sent to Algeria to "deliver money" to still other al Qaeda operatives. Al Qaeda is a highly compartmentalized organization, just as Saddam’s intelligence services were. Yet, source 6841 seems to know details that only someone with sufficiently senior access inside the al Qaeda organization could know.
Continue reading "Reading Saddam’s Intelligence Files, Part 3: Source 6841" »
When the 9-11 Commission’s final report was published in July 2004, some in the press were quick to trumpet one line in the report that appeared to dispense with the issue of Saddam’s ties to al Qaeda. The Commission reported on a number of contacts between the two sides, but ultimately concluded: "to date we have seen no evidence that these or earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship."
For many, that was the end of the story. But re-read the Commission’s report carefully (as some did at the time) and you realize it found a number of disturbing threads tying Saddam’s Iraq to al Qaeda. For example, the Commission reported that Ayman al Zawahiri set up at least one and maybe two meetings between al Qaeda and Saddam’s regime in 1998. The Commission explained that Zawahiri was in a position to act as a liaison since he had "ties of his own to the Iraqis." The Commission did not explain further.
But now, thanks to the release of a new study on Saddam’s ties to terrorism, we learn more about Zawahiri’s "ties" to Iraq. The Iraqi Perspectives Project report (which we’ve discussed here, here, and here) explains:
Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives.
As Steve Hayes pointed out again this morning, the study cites an Iraqi Intelligence document dated March 18, 1993. The translation of the document provided in the study begins:
We list herein the organizations that our agency [IIS] cooperates with and have relations with various elements in many parts of the Arab world and who also have the expertise to carry out assignments indicated in the above directive [the cited directive has not been discovered yet].
Ayman al Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad is one of the nine terrorist organizations then discussed in the extracts of the document cited:
Islamic Jihad Organization [Egyptian Islamic Jihad]
- In a meeting in the Sudan we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt. Our information on the group is as follows:
- It was established in 1979.
- Its goal is to apply the Islamic shari' a law and establish Islamic rule.
- It is considered one of the most brutal Egyptian organizations. It carried out numerous successful operations, including the assassination of Sadat.
- We have previously met with the organization's representative and we agreed on a plan to carry out commando operations against the Egyptian regime.
So we now know that Zawahiri’s "ties" to Iraq included an agreement to cooperate on "commando operations against the Egyptian regime." This would seem to be evidence of an "operational collaborative relationship." That Saddam’s regime was willing to sponsor the EIJ’s operations should be a major blow to those who would argue that Saddam and al Qaeda could never, ever cooperate. It sheds new light on the 9/11 Commission’s report, and raises a number of questions.
Continue reading ""Ties of His Own"" »
Yesterday, director of national intelligence Mike McConnell participated in a foreign affairs symposium at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. This interesting exchange occurred between McConnell and Hopkins political science professor Dr. Stephen David:
DR. DAVID: Let me talk about torture. Is waterboarding a form of torture? Is it an effective means of extracting information? If it is a form of torture or if it is not an effective means of extracting information, why will not the Intelligence Community, the CIA foreswear its use?
DIRECTOR McCONNELL: Let’s take it from the beginning. Has waterboarding ever been used by a professional organization whose mission is to extract information? The answer is yes. You might ask what are the circumstances? Three times. Situations where there’s been interrogation over a period of time. It was unsuccessful. Water boarding was used and then information started to flow.
Just to put it in context, probably upwards of a quarter to a third of all the information generated in this period of time came from these three individuals. It’s saved lives.
I would be willing to say it’s saved lives for some of the people who know, of people who are known to people in this room. So you’ve got to ask yourself the question, is it worth it?
Now here’s the problem for America. We have a political system that will define the bounds. This community, will always operate inside those bounds. Now what the image, particularly across the country, the image is Abu Ghraib. It was an abhorrent situation where some youngsters got out of control and did some terrible things, made photographs, and they are suffering the penalty or the punishment for having done that. That’s what people think about when they say torture.
We went through a long debate about how to do this consistent with the Geneva Convention and so on. Laws were passed. And we agreed upon an Army Field Manual for how interrogations will be conducted by the U.S. military. That in fact is where we are.
Now think of the Army Field Manual is about like this. Think of the law is about like that. So the question is, if it’s legal within the law, do you want to keep those techniques available in a situation where it might save lives, particularly if it were weapons of mass destruction?
Now add one other thing. Those three interrogations with waterboarding were hardened criminals. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Go to the web site, look up KSM, read about him. It was his intent to repeat 9/11 many times over and he would not speak with us. Also in the timeframe, this happened in 2002, might have gone to 2003, I just don’t remember, but 2002 timeframe. We didn’t know much about al-Qaida. This was a period of time when we just did not have information, understanding and so on. Have we used it since that time? No. The President gave us a list of techniques. Is it in that list of techniques? No. If we needed to use it, what would happen? We would have to ask, first the Agency would have to ask me, I’d have to agree or disagree. Then it would have to go to the Attorney General. The Attorney General would have to make a ruling, legal or not. Then we’d have to go to the President and get permission. Once that happened, you have to go notify the Congress.
So the way I think about it is we will abide by the laws of the nation. The laws right now are this size. The Army Field Manual is this size. So do we want to take all those options away and move them down to something smaller? That’s a decision for the nation. If the nation does it, we will comply. If the nation leaves that larger body of techniques open, then we’ll use every technique available to us given it would prevent a horrendous attack on the United States.
DR. DAVID: Again, just to clarify, if you felt the situation warranted it, you would us waterboarding, and you do believe in certain situations it’s effective and the only way of extracting information.
DIRECTOR McCONNELL: Were you listening?
DR. DAVID: Yeah, I listened to every word.
DIRECTOR McCONNELL: Well, I said it’s not in our list of techniques. If we decided we needed it we would go through a procedure to get permission and we would go notify the Congress.
So if it’s not illegal and it would prevent an attack on a city that would save hundreds, thousands of lives, would we use it? I would certainly be persuaded in that direction, given that the Attorney General verified it’s a legal technique.
Does it work? Yes, it works.
I'm skeptical of the notion that the effectiveness of the nation's intelligence agencies will be helped by opening up their operations so that Americans feel better about them:
A top intelligence official says he wants to pull back the curtain of secrecy to let Americans see more clearly what it is intelligence agencies do, and how they do it.
"We've allowed our detractors to frame the national debate and cast us as the villains," said Donald Kerr, the No. 2 official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "We in the intelligence community are not winning hearts and minds in the U.S. We're not even trying. That's what bothers me most."
It was a wistful call to restore public trust in a community tarnished by its own actions and by allegations of misdeeds that feed on secrecy...
Kerr said he was thankful there hasn't been a poll asking people about their feelings on the intelligence community. "The number might be depressingly low," he said. "It's because they don't understand what we do."
I would move in the opposite direction: rather than more openness, I'd like more secrecy--particularly given the fact that Langley seems to leak like a sieve. I'd rather not get an accounting of exactly how many suspects have been waterboarded. I'd rather not hear members of our intelligence community say things like "I consider myself a citizen of the world" (no cite; that's a personal experience).
And when someone asks an intelligence official whether the United States had the hand in the demise of some terror suspect, I'd rather the answer be a wry smile, along with a simple "you know I'd never disclose that -- even if we did." Wouldn't the intel "community" be more effective if it was a little less understood?
The government shows up at your office just days after the 9/11 attack and asks for your help in the war on terror. What are you going to do? According to Glenn Greenwald, you should call a lawyer (isn't that always what the lawyers say). But telecom executives did the only thing they could do--assist the government in whatever way possible. I doubt any of them even had a moment of doubt in complying with the government's request--worst case, the NSA captures a call from some innocent, naturalized American talking to his al Qaeda-affiliated cousin in Paktia, not exactly an ethical minefield.
But the industry now faces as much as $7.243 trillion in liability, as practically every telephone customer in North America is to be considered a victim of this dastardly operation. After months of demagoguing the issue, the Dems in Congress are finally going to cave and grant the firms immunity from lawsuits that are not only frivolous, but a threat to national security.
Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald, who's devoted the last three months of his life to this issue, is despondent:
There's very little point anymore in writing about how the Congressional Democratic leadership is complicit in all of the worst Bush abuses, or about how craven they are. All of that is far too documented and established at this point to be worth spending any time discussing. They were never going to take a stand against warrantless eavesdropping or the destruction of the rule of law via telecom amnesty for one simple reason: many of them don't actually oppose those things, and many who claim to oppose them don't actually care about any of it. That's all a given.
But what is somewhat baffling in all of this is just how politically stupid and self-destructive their behavior is. If the plan all along was to give Bush everything he wanted, as it obviously was, why not just do it at the beginning? Instead, they picked a very dramatic fight that received substantial media attention. They exposed their freshmen and other swing-district members to attack ads. They caused their base and their allies to spend substantial energy and resources defending them from these attacks.
And to think of all the other things Glenn Greenwald could have not achieved over the last few months were his energy and resources devoted to other hopeless crusades!
The House of Representatives is likely to vote next week on a FISA extension, but not the bipartisan bill which passed the Senate by a wide margin:
“We don’t have agreement but ... I am very hopeful that we will have legislation on the floor next week, “ House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer , D-Md., said on the floor Thursday in a colloquy with Minority Whip Roy Blunt , R-Mo...
The Senate version, which the White House helped to draft, would grant retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have been sued for their alleged cooperation with the administration’s warrantless surveillance activities after Sept. 11, 2001. The House measure includes no such liability shield.
Liberals in the House are unwilling to extend liability protection to telecommunications companies that facilitated surveillance on suspected terrorists operating abroad. Quin Hillyer looks at the lawsuits that House Democrats are insisting go forward:
Moreover, the suit defines the class of aggrieved citizens as “all individuals” who were customers of the phone company “at any time after September 2001” that the program was in effect. In this one suit, that class is identified as consisting of 24.6 million people. How all 24.6 million Americans could possibly be harmed by this program aimed at suspected foreign terrorists is a question perhaps best answered in the Twilight Zone...
Do the math: The total potential payout by AT&T for the first two categories of alleged violations is $49.2 billion. Meanwhile, at $100 per day for each day of the four years at issue after 9/11, the total potential liability for each of the two latter counts is $3 trillion, 591 billion.
That number times 2, plus the $49.2 billion, comes out to a potential grand liability of $7.243 trillion. That is half of the entire national economy! And that’s even before “punitive damages” are taken into account.
Don't worry, though. Speaker Pelosi is 100 percent certain that there's no national security risk for allowing FISA to lapse, or leaving telecom companies on the hook for cooperating.
Feel better now?
Andy McCarthy has an outstanding deconstruction of the political grandstanding that resulted in this piece from top Democrats involved in intelligence and judiciary oversight. McCarthy points out that Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, not long ago had the opposite view of the one he put forward in today's Washington Post.
The op-ed marks a dramatic shift for Rockefeller. The West Virginia Democrat championed the Senate bill, which was voted out of his committee by a 13-2 landslide. As recently as February 14, he was quite candid in acknowledging that the consequence of allowing the Protect America Act (PAA) to lapse, as it did a little over a week ago when House Democrats refused to act, would be “degraded” intelligence-collection capacity.
Now, however, with his fellow Democrats getting hammered as unserious about protecting American lives, it’s evidently time to close ranks. Rockefeller has suddenly joined the “Everything Is Beautiful” chorus that claims the sun’s setting on the PAA is really no big deal since any security gaps can still be filled by FISA — the ill-conceived, obsolete Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.
Rockefeller does this regularly. He did it on Iraq, and on surveillance. Yet he somehow manages to escape the kind of truth-squadding regularly visited on the Bush administration and others who hold more (consistently) hawkish views.
On surveillance, Rockefeller was one of a select group of congressional leaders notified about the National Security Agency's "Terrorist Surveillance Program," shortly after that program started. When the program was exposed in the New York Times back in December 2005, Rockefeller's office quickly released a handwritten letter he wrote to Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003. Rockefeller introduced the letter by claiming he was writing to "reiterate" concerns he had about the program. But those familiar with the briefings on TSP say Rockefeller had never before expressed any reservations.
Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert recalled one briefing in which then-NSA Director Michael Hayden described the program and spoke of its benefits. Haster said that Cheney spoke next. "I remember him specifically saying, 'OK, we need your understanding to go forward. Does anybody have any objection? Do we need to do anything legislatively? It was a question Cheney asked. And everybody agreed: No, we don't need to do this in legislation. We need to let our intelligence go forward and do what they're doing. So he laid it out very specifically to everybody. I remember everybody was present at the time."
Another participant in those meetings put it this way: "It was [the Democrats'] unanimous recommendation that we continue the program and that we not seek legislative authorization. Jay Rockefeller was sitting at the table."
Senator Pat Roberts, who was then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said when the program was exposed that Rockefeller's opposition to it was something quite new. "On many occasions, Senator Rockefeller express to the vice president his vocal support for the program; his most recent expression of support was only two weeks ago."
On Iraq, Rockefeller's screeching u-turn came in public. Before the war, he spoke of the "unmistakable evidence" that Saddam Hussein was "working aggressively" on nuclear weapons and described the grave threat posed by Iraq's "existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities." After the war, Rockefeller went after the Bush Administration as "fundamentally misleading" for saying the exact same things.
In fact, Rockefeller went further than the Bush administration, calling the threat from Iraq "imminent."
There has been some debate over how "imminent" a threat Iraq poses. I do believe that Iraq poses an imminent threat, but I also believe that after September 11, that question is increasingly outdated. It is in the nature of these weapons, and the way they are targeted against civilian populations, that documented capability and demonstrated intent may be the only warning we get.
And though Rockefeller voted in favor of the war, he said later that he did so based on inadequate intelligence. But before the war, he said he had all of the information he needed:
To insist on further evidence could put some of our fellow Americans at risk. Can we afford to take that chance? We cannot!
So Rockefeller's latest reversal is part of a long pattern. He supports aggressive national security measures until they are politically unpopular. And yet he has the audacity to claim, as he did once again in today's op-ed, that it is the White House and Republicans who are playing "political games?"
According to multiple sources, House Democrats have decided to discontinue the authority of the administration to tap the communications of foreign terrorists operating overseas. They've decided to block a bill with majority support, effectively shutting down much of our intelligence collection on two-thirds of all terrorist communications.
It's important to consider what that means. One way to do that is to look at the legislation the Democrats did endorse, and listen to Democrats describe why it's necessary. Last November 15, this is what Intelligence Committee Chairman Sil Reyes (D-TX) had to say about the Democrats' RESTORE Act:
...we also have the mandate to provide our intelligence professionals the legal authorities required to protect the country from our enemies.
The RESTORE Act... exempts truly foreign-to-foreign communications from any judicial review, even when the communication passes through the United States or the surveillance device is still actually located in the United States. Second, it authorizes the acquisition of foreign intelligence information for all matters of national defense, including information relating to terrorism, espionage, sabotage, and other threats to the national security of our country...
I urge my colleagues to reject partisan politics in favor of sound policy and support this critically important bill.
So according to the Democratic Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, it's 'critically important' to ensure that the intelligence community avoid the time-consuming process of obtaining individual warrants to conduct surveillance of people like Osama bin Laden. But now that's exactly what Democrats will require -- in defiance of the majority of the House and Senate.
More on this from Andrew McCarthy here.
As the Democratic presidential race careens towards what may be an ugly finish, liberals are increasingly outraged that superdelegates could frustrate the will of a majority of Democratic primary voters. To this I say: what's the big deal? Liberals in the House of Representatives are doing it right now.
Here's the FISA state of play: the Senate yesterday soundly rejected an amendment by Chris Dodd to deny telecom companies legal protections for their good-faith cooperation with terrorist surveillance. Dodd and other liberals apparently want future requests to the telecom companies to sound like this: "Hi, I'm with the CIA and we want you to listen in on Osama bin Laden's phone calls. It's an urgent matter of national security, and you better have plenty to spend on lawyers because you'll get sued out the wazoo."
The Senate rejected this approach 67-31, then passed the surveillance bill 68-29.
This should effectively end the debate over whether to extend protection to these companies. That's because 21 'Blue Dog' House Democrats have written to Speaker Pelosi and told her that they support the Senate bill, and want to see it brought to the House floor promptly for a vote:
The Rockefeller-Bond FISA legislation contains satisfactory language addressing all these issues, and we would fully support that measure should it reach the House floor without substantial change. We believe these components will ensure a strong national security apparatus that can thwart terrorism across the globe and save American lives here in our country.
Combined with the 198 Republicans who support this approach, there is a clear majority in favor of telecom immunity, and of the Senate bill more generally. For those committed to majority rule, there's no more need for discussion, right? The bill ought to come to the House floor, be approved, and sent to the president.
But that's not what House Democrats are doing. This afternoon they're muscling through a 21-day extension of FISA, which they hope will give them breathing room to twist arms. Then they might pass a bill that takes the teeth out of terrorist surveillance, and which the president would veto.
Why are Democrats throwing out the principle of majority rule just to wind up back where they started? Because that's what MoveOn.org and their liberal base demands -- regardless of how futile the effort is. And if you don't intend to make laws that reflect the will of the majority, why select a presidential nominee that way either?
Congressional Democrats are getting off easy. With attention focused on the presidential campaign, there's been little coverage of their handling of FISA, which has been characterized by short-term extensions to the bill and behind the scenes efforts to gut the program.
The central point of the debate in Congress is whether to provide retroactive immunity to telecom companies that cooperated with U.S. intelligence agencies on surveillance. Carter Wood points to a good explanation from the Senate Intelligence Committee of why it decided to do so--the amendment passed by an overwhelming margin earlier today.
With the Senate now ready to pass a FISA reauthorization that lasts six years, and which is otherwise acceptable to the president, the next question is what the House of Representatives will do. Roll Call reports:
Because the immunity provision will likely remain intact, the House is expected to balk. The House measure does not provide immunity, and, in the eyes of the American Civil Liberties Union, provides better protections than the Senate for Americans who might get caught up in the wiretapping dragnet authorized by both the bills and the current law...
But without the Senate’s version of immunity, there are not likely 60 votes in the Senate needed to prevent a filibuster, Republicans said.
It's unclear exactly what happens next. House liberals are unwilling to accept the telecom immunity provision, so the debate is frozen. Never mind that the more than two-thirds of the Senate voted today to protect those companies that had relied on the assurances of the White House and Attorney General (Senator Obama voted against the amendment, while Hillary Clinton missed the vote).
It seems entirely possible that the Democratic leadership will now have to push for yet another 15-day extension of surveillance authority. How long can they kick the can down the road?
How livid? Well, mad enough to do something that I've never heard of the CIA doing before: publishing a book review on their government website. The offending title is Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, a Pulitzer Prize winning account of the 60+ year history of the Agency. From the Central Intelligence Agency website:
Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes is not the definitive history of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that it purports to be. Nor is it the well researched work that many reviewers say it is. It is odd, in fact, that much of the hype surrounding the book concerns its alleged mastery of available sources.
Weiner and his favorable reviewers-most, like Weiner, journalists-have cited the plethora of his sources as if the fact of their variety and number by themselves make the narrative impervious to criticism.
But the thing about scholarship is that one must use sources honestly, and one doesn't get a pass on this even if he is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the New York Times. Starting with a title that is based on a gross distortion of events, the book is a 600-page op-ed piece masquerading as serious history; it is the advocacy of a particularly dark point of view under the guise of scholarship. Weiner has allowed his agenda to drive his research and writing, which is, of course, exactly backwards....
The irony is that a new history of CIA is needed to fill the gap left by the now dated works of John Ranelagh (The Agency, 1986) and Christopher Andrew (For the President's Eyes Only, 1995). Having read the book, I have to conclude that this is not it; anyone who wants a balanced perspective of CIA and its history should steer well clear of Legacy of Ashes.
Ouch. I've read the book myself and there's no denying that Weiner placed a heavy emphasis on the CIA's failures, although I suspect that--in his eagerness to defend the Agency--Nicholas Dujmovic (a CIA historian and career analyst) may have overstated his case a bit.
From my own readings, I found it intensely frustrating to have to fight through hundreds of pages of the CIA getting their butts kicked by the KGB and associated Warsaw Pact alphabet soup security agencies. Surely there were Agency successes beyond placing the Shah in power and rigging Central American elections?
Dujmovic’s critiques are far more specific than what was illustrated in the quote--read the whole thing.
Defenders of harsh interrogation techniques like waterboarding have generally been nonplussed by the recent news that the CIA destroyed videotapes of several interrogations. For waterboarding's harsh critics however, the news has caused some heartburn. In particular, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle (and contributor to the site TruthDig.com) wants to know why Speaker Pelosi didn't speak up about what she knew:
Pelosi's press aide Brendan Daly told me that the Washington Post report on her CIA briefing was "overblown" because Pelosi, then the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee thought the techniques described, which the CIA insists included waterboarding, were planned for the future and not yet in use. Pelosi claimed that "several months later" her successor as the ranking Democrat, Rep. Jane Harman of Los Angeles County, was advised the techniques "had in fact been employed" and wrote a classified letter to the CIA in protest, and Pelosi "concurred." Neither went public with her concerns...
Pelosi testified before the commission on May 22, 2003 but uttered not a word of caution about the methods used....
Hopefully I am missing something here, having admired Pelosi for decades, but if she and the others in the know have another version of these events, it's time to come clean.
Here's one possible explanation: Speaker Pelosi recognized the importance of getting information from captured enemies in the period after September 11, but changed her mind about it when she sensed political opportunity in criticizing the Bush administration. Based on the Washington Post's reporting of the briefing she received on harsh interrogation, it's even possible that she was among those who wondered whether the methods were tough enough:
In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.
After all, an informed Congressional source tells the Post that Pelosi at least raised no objection to the technique when she learned about it:
Pelosi declined to comment directly on her reaction to the classified briefings. But a congressional source familiar with Pelosi's position on the matter said the California lawmaker did recall discussions about enhanced interrogation. The source said Pelosi recalls that techniques described by the CIA were still in the planning stage -- they had been designed and cleared with agency lawyers but not yet put in practice -- and acknowledged that Pelosi did not raise objections at the time.
Reasonable people can and do disagree about whether waterboarding constitutes torture, but given that there's no evidence the technique was ever widely used, and that it's use has been discontinued, it's clear that Democrats are seizing on it for political benefit. Pelosi's sudden devotion to stopping waterboarding provides even greater evidence. One can only hope that the left continues to press the Speaker for an explanation of her conversion--it's clear that she long ago stopped listening to the rest of us.
The statement from Fred Thompson:
"The accuracy of the latest NIE on Iran should be received with a good deal of skepticism. Our intelligence community has often underestimated the intentions of adversaries, including Saddam Hussein's Iraq and North Korea. And are all of the CIA detractors now going to take intelligence pronouncements at face value? It's awfully convenient for a lot of people: the administration gets to say its policies worked; the Democrats get to claim we should have eased up on Iran a long time ago: and Russia and China can claim sanctions on Iran are not necessary. Who benefits from all this? Iran.
"And what if the NIE estimate is accurate? It's essentially an analysis of Iran's intentions at a point in time. Meanwhile, Iran continues to enrich uranium for allegedly peaceful purposes, but which would allow them to easily transition to a nuclear weapons program at any point in the future. Maybe even now--now that so many seem willing to forget Iran's past deceptions and ongoing intransigence. After all, a nuclear weapons program is simply an extension of the process by why uranium is enriched for civilian nuclear fuel. To this day Iran has yet to comply with international demands and its Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty requirements for open inspections and other safeguard measures.
"The bottom line is that the United States must continue to improve its human intelligence capabilities and intelligence analysis. We must hope for the best, but not let our guard down for a moment. If something appears to be too good to be true, it very well may be."
Thompson gets it just about right, I think. The big news is that Iran might have nuclear weapons in two years. Is that reassuring? I'm not sure I understand the coverage that's come out given this fact. Iran is basically getting together the sugar, the flour, the icing . . . it just hasn't baked the cake yet. One has to ask why a country with so much oil would even want nuclear energy?
Today's New York Times editorial, titled "Good and Bad News About Iran":
There is a lot of good news in the latest intelligence assessment about Iran. Tehran, we are now told, halted its secret nuclear weapons program in 2003, which means that President Bush has absolutely no excuse for going to war against Iran.
Then the bad news:
First, the report says “with high confidence” that Iran did have a secret nuclear weapons program and that it stopped only after it got caught and was threatened with international punishment. Even now, Tehran’s scientists are working to master the skills to make nuclear fuel — the hardest part of building a weapon.
Anyone who wants to give the Iranians the full benefit of the doubt should read the last four years of reports from United Nations’ nuclear inspectors about Iran’s 18-year history of hiding and dissembling. Or last month’s report, which criticized Tehran for providing “diminishing” information and access to its current program. In one of those ironies that would be delicious if it didn’t involve nuclear weapons, an official close to the inspection agency told The Times yesterday that the new American assessment might be too generous to Iran.
James Taranto:
In other words, the bad news, per the Times, is that a lunatic theocracy may soon become a lunatic theocracy armed with nuclear weapons. The good news is that that there's nothing President Bush can do to stop it.
Israel enters the NIE fray:
Israeli officials, who've been warning that Iran would soon pose a nuclear threat to the world, reacted angrily Tuesday to a new U.S. intelligence finding that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons development program in 2003 and to date hasn't resumed trying to produce nuclear weapons.
So here we have two intelligence communities, Israel and the United States, with two completely different estimates. Israel doesn't enjoy the electronic collection capabilities that the United States does, but the Mossad is widely to believed to field one of the most effective HUMINT networks in the world.
So who to believe?
There's no shortage of intel wonks who believe that running agents--HUMINT--is more reliable than signature, imagery, and signals intelligence. That's Israel's specialty. Given the Mossad's past successes, and their obsession with Iran's atomic program, one would assume that Israel has penetrated the Iranian government with a certain level of effectiveness. At the very least, they're worth a listen.
Update: More from Max Boot at Contentions.
As many recognize, the latest NIE on Iran’s nuclear weapons program directly contradicts what the U.S. Intelligence Community was saying just two years previously. And it appears that this about-face was very recent. How recent?
Consider that on July 11, 2007, roughly four or so months prior to the most recent NIE’s publication, Deputy Director of Analysis Thomas Fingar gave the following testimony before the House Armed Services Committee (emphasis added):
Iran and North Korea are the states of most concern to us. The United States’ concerns about Iran are shared by many nations, including many of Iran’s neighbors. Iran is continuing to pursue uranium enrichment and has shown more interest in protracting negotiations and working to delay and diminish the impact of UNSC sanctions than in reaching an acceptable diplomatic solution. We assess that Tehran is determined to develop nuclear weapons--despite its international obligations and international pressure. This is a grave concern to the other countries in the region whose security would be threatened should Iran acquire nuclear weapons.
This paragraph appeared under the subheading: "Iran Assessed As Determined to Develop Nuclear Weapons." And the entirety of Fingar’s 22-page testimony was labeled "Information as of July 11, 2007." No part of it is consistent with the latest NIE, in which our spooks tell us Iran suspended its covert nuclear weapons program in 2003 "primarily in response to international pressure" and they "do not know whether (Iran) currently intends to develop nuclear weapons."
The inconsistencies are more troubling when we realize that, according to the Wall Street Journal, Thomas Fingar is one of the three officials who were responsible for crafting the latest NIE. The Journal cites "an intelligence source" as describing Fingar and his two colleagues as "hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials." (The New York Sun drew attention to one of Fingar’s colleagues yesterday.)
So, if it is true that Dr. Fingar played a leading role in crafting this latest NIE, then we are left with serious questions:
- Why did your opinion change so drastically in just four months time?
- Is the new intelligence or analysis really that good? Is it good enough to overturn your previous assessments? Or, has it never really been good enough to make a definitive assessment at all?
- Did your political or ideological leanings, or your policy preferences, or those of your colleagues, influence your opinion in any way?
Many in the mainstream press have been willing to cite this latest NIE unquestioningly. Perhaps they should start asking some pointed questions. (Don’t hold your breath.)
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