Dave Drier, in an interview with Dennis Miller on his radio show last week, emphasized the importance of granting legal immunity to the Telecomms when they pass to our intelligence agencies communication intelligence. As you remember, several years ago the patriotic-impared New York Times published classified information on the warrantless wiretap program (even though communications which include at least one party not on domestic soil were never considered warrant-required). Democrats then made an election issue of it, claiming that it would ruin our democracy -- even though the British and French have been doing so for decades and their Republics are just fine, thank you very much.

Drier quoted Mike McConnell -- our current Director of National Intelligence who was also served on Bill Clinton's National Security Council -- as saying that ever since the Telecomms stopped monitoring communications without assurances of immunity from legal threats, "We are missing about 60 percent of the communications taking place among the bad guys, the people who want to kill us."

Nice, huh.

So when Barack Obama, among others, say we are less safe now than before 9-11, they're partly right. But not for the reasons they think.

Now, here's the down side of the new FISA deal.

The steep price of this authority is that from now on all of these overseas eavesdropping orders will require advance approval by a special FISA court of rotating judges. This will apply even to emails or calls that emanate in, say, Peshawar and never leave Pakistan – except that by the accident of our Internet age they may happen to move through American switching networks.

The deal does carve out an exception to this judicial preapproval for "exigent circumstances" involving urgent threats, but the FISA judges would still have to approve after the fact. No other nation in the world, to our knowledge, requires such deference to judges when tracking foreign enemies abroad.

This judicial review is supposedly to check abuses by the executive. But it also imposes a judge in the middle of the wartime chain of command. A judge, moreover, who may have no special intelligence expertise and no understanding of the enemy threat. For this reason, these judges will in practice tend to rubber stamp executive requests.

But the precedent of judicial intrusion is still dismaying because it will be used as a baseline to limit future Presidential discretion. As for potential abuses, at least an Attorney General and President are accountable to voters if they use this authority to spy on their political opponents. On the other hand, if a willful judge denies a surveillance request and Americans are killed as a result, he is accountable to no one. Recall the "wall" of separation between intelligence and law enforcement that developed in the 1990s under domestic FISA and which the 9/11 Commission so criticized. No one paid any political price for that.
That wall, by the way, was mostly due to the insistance of former Attorney General Janet Reno's deputy, Jamie Gorelick.

By the way, should he defeat McCain in November, do you know who Barack Obama is considering for his Attorney General post? Yep, Jamie Gorelick.

Welcome to September 10, 2001.

Labels: CIA, civil liberties, intelligence, interrogation, surveillance, war on terror, wiretap

"A guy that's got a flat tire outside a nuclear facility in one location means nothing," said Thomas E. Bush III, the FBI's assistant director of the criminal justice information services division. "Run the guy and he's had a flat tire outside of five nuclear facilities and you have a clue."

In a paper called "Intelligence-Led Policing: The New Intelligence Architecture," law enforcement authorities working with the Justice Department said officers " 'on the beat' are an excellent resource for gathering information on all kinds of potential threats and vulnerabilities."

"Despite the many definitions of 'intelligence' that have been promulgated over the years, the simplest and clearest of these is 'information plus analysis equals intelligence,' " the paper said.
That's from an article in the Washington Post highlighting a computer networked intelligence sharing system for domestic law enforcement called "National Data Exchange, or N-DEx." Privacy advocates will no doubt issue their reactionary warnings of big brother, but data mining it itself is something every computer website, credit card and marketing companies do already.

"Law enforcement and federal security authorities said these developments, along with a new willingness by police to share information, hold out the promise of fulfilling post-Sept. 11, 2001, mandates to connect the dots and root out signs of threats before attacks can occur."

Oh, yeah. Remember that whole 9-11 thing? Remember so many outraged citizens wondering how this wasn't stopped. Connect the dots? Either we're serious about it or the next time we lose 3,000 people in a terror attack we'll have deserved to become such easy targets.

Labels: CIA, civil liberties, FBI, intelligence, surveillance, war on terror

One reads this and reasonably concludes that former CIA interrogator John Kiriakou is right on all four counts: (1) Waterboarding could be constituted as torture. (2) Waterboarding seems contrary to American ideals. (3) Waterboarding works. And (4) Waterboarding has saved the lives of American citizens and soldiers.

Waterboarding Recounted
Ex-CIA Officer Says It 'Probably Saved Lives' but Is Torture

By Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 11, 2007; A01

A former CIA officer who participated in the capture and questioning of the first al-Qaeda terrorist suspect to be waterboarded said yesterday that the harsh technique provided an intelligence breakthrough that "probably saved lives," but that he now regards the tactic as torture.

Zayn Abidin Muhammed Hussein abu Zubaida, the first high-ranking al-Qaeda member captured after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, broke in less than a minute after he was subjected to the technique and began providing interrogators with information that led to the disruption of several planned attacks, said John Kiriakou, who served as a CIA interrogator in Pakistan.

Abu Zubaida was one of two detainees whose interrogation was captured in video recordings that the CIA later destroyed. The recent disclosure of the tapes' destruction ignited a recent furor on Capitol Hill and allegations that the agency tried to hide evidence of illegal torture.

"It was like flipping a switch," said Kiriakou, the first former CIA employee directly involved in the questioning of "high-value" al-Qaeda detainees to speak publicly.

In an interview, Kiriakou said he did not witness Abu Zubaida's waterboarding but was part of the interrogation team that questioned him in a hospital in Pakistan for weeks after his capture in that country in the spring of 2002.

He described Abu Zubaida as ideologically zealous, defiant and uncooperative -- until the day in mid-summer when his captors strapped him to a board, wrapped his nose and mouth in cellophane and forced water into his throat in a technique that simulates drowning.

The waterboarding lasted about 35 seconds before Abu Zubaida broke down, according to Kiriakou, who said he was given a detailed description of the incident by fellow team members. The next day, Abu Zubaida told his captors he would tell them whatever they wanted, Kiriakou said.

"He said that Allah had come to him in his cell and told him to cooperate, because it would make things easier for his brothers," Kiriakou said.

... Kiriakou, whose account first appeared in a story on ABC News's Web site, said he decided to go public to correct what he says are misperceptions about the role played by CIA employees in the early months of the government's anti-terrorism efforts.

"It's easy to point to intelligence failures and perceived intelligence failures, but the public has to understand how hard people are working to make them safe," he said.

Kiriakou said he first spoke to Abu Zubaida in a Pakistani military hospital. Abu Zubaida was recovering from wounds he suffered in the gun battle that led to his capture.

After he came out of a coma, Abu Zubaida was initially talkative, holding long conversations with Kiriakou from his hospital bed. The two discussed personal matters that ranged from religion to Abu Zubaida's private regret about having never married or fathered children.

Kiriakou said he repeatedly counseled Abu Zubaida to provide details about al-Qaeda's infrastructure, leadership and plans. Abu Zubaida refused and eventually became more defiant.

He was later flown to a secret CIA prison, where he was subjected to harsher methods, including waterboarding, Kiriakou said. Kiriakou said he made a final appeal to Abu Zubaida shortly before the waterboarding began.

"You have one more opportunity to cooperate. My guys are telling me that you're being a jerk," Kiriakou recalled telling Abu Zubaida. His reply, according to Kiriakou: "They're being jerks, too."

Kiriakou said he now has mixed feelings about the use of waterboarding. He said that he thinks the technique provided a crucial break to the CIA and probably helped prevent attacks, but that he is now convinced that waterboarding is torture, and "Americans are better than that."

"Maybe that's inconsistent, but that's how I feel," he said. "It was an ugly little episode that was perhaps necessary at that time. But we've moved beyond that."
I'm sorry, but I have a hard time buying the whole "we've moved beyond that [waterboarding]."

If Mr. Kiriakou is saying we've since developed just as effective but less painful means of interrogation than so be it, and he should say so. But to just dismiss something that broke Zubaida in just 35 seconds after countless fruitless attempts previous to that using less coercive interrogation seems to be a very illogical and, excuse the pun, "tortured" argument to me.

How can Mr. Kiriakou plea that the "public has to understand how hard people are working to make them safe," and in the next breath argue that we shouldn't do something which he, Mr. Kiriakou, admits makes that very public safe? Simply to soothe his sense of morality? I'm sorry, but one has to make a stronger argument than that.

Labels: CIA, intelligence, interrogation

In other words, Iran didn't abandon its nuclear weapons program. On the contrary, it went public with it. It's certainly plausible Tehran may have suspended one aspect of the program--the aspect that is the least technically challenging and that, if exposed, would offer smoking-gun proof of ill intent. Then again, why does the NIE have next to nothing to say about Iran's efforts to produce plutonium at the Arak facility, which is of the same weapons-producing type as Israel's Dimona and North Korea's Yongbyon reactors? And why the silence on Iran's ongoing and acknowledged testing of ballistic missiles of ever-longer range, the development of which only makes sense as a vehicle to deliver a weapon of mass destruction?
-- Bret Stephens, WSJ.

Read the rest.

Labels: CIA, Iran, NIE, proliferation

All too typical. And hypocritical. Were this discovery made of Republicans you can have no doubt it'd be all the rage in the mainstream media.

[Weekly Standard] Speaker Pelosi, did you really think you'd get away with this one?

The Washington Post reported yesterday:

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...

With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter.
The Democrats have made fools of themselves--once again. Bloggers are having a field day, and agree that this is yet more evidence that the Democrats are only concerned about their image with their left-wing base.

Bryan Preston expresses his rage at HotAir: "This story exposes the fact that the Democrats have been playing games on waterboarding for years now, publicly decrying it while privately raising no useful objection to it."

Captain Ed adds, "Only well after the practice had been abandoned did Congress raise objections to its use, and then never acknowledging their own acquiescence to it earlier. That lack of honesty allowed them to paint themselves as shocked, shocked! that waterboarding had been used as an interrogation technique."

And from Instapundit: "Lots of people who were talking tough back then subsequently changed their tunes -- out of either a sudden flowering of scruples or an unprincipled desire to go after the Bush Administration with any weapon that came to hand."

Democrats are claiming that the world was different immediately after 9/11, so techniques used then may not be necessary now--yet they continue to wonder why. The answer is obvious to the conservative bloggers.

More from Preston: "Has the actual threat of large-scale terrorism receded enough so that we can all go back to a 9-10 slumber and wash our collective hands of the tactics that we approved of in the clarifying months to years immediately after 9-11? I don't think so, though the threat has been blunted by, you guessed it, tough action in Afghanistan and Iraq."

Paul Mirengoff concludes, "We haven't been attacked in more than six years, quite possibly because of the information we obtained through waterboarding and other aggressive techniques. Thus, the partisan instinct, coupled with the joy of posturing, prevails."

And California Conservative raises a question that must be asked before November 2008:

"The first instincts after 9/11 was to do whatever it took to 'protect the American people.' It wasn't until groups like CAIR and the ACLU took exception that Democrats objected. What does that tell you about Democrats' ability to prevent terrorist attacks?"
We have to wonder.

Labels: CIA, democrats, Hypocrisy, interrogation, media bias

I'm just about NIE'd out, but over at Investor's Business Daily, Tom Joscelyn has a reiteration of his previous post questioning the validity and partisanship of the latest NIE.

It's also good to see that Republicans in Congress are going to take action beyond simple criticism that opponents could easily spin as sour grapes: Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) is going to promote a bipartisan panel to study the differences between the 2005 and 2007 NIEs, and how the conclusions could be so different from one another. He's reportedly going to base the panel on history -- the 1995 intelligence communities 15-year estimate on emerging missile threats. That 1995 study was similarly and fiercely debated in government circles.

Presidential candidate Fred Thompson justifiably argues that "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." Indeed. That same NIE, supposedly absolving Iran, had fine print stating Iran "may still be able to develop a weapon between 2010 and 2015."

In other words, this is all academic, and we don't know any more about Iran today than two years ago. Or since 1979 for that matter.

The Wall Street Journal opines that the intelligence fiasco on Iran simply underscores how out of control the intel community has become under the Bush administration. "Mr. Bush has too often failed to settle internal disputes and enforce the results," says the Journal:

What's amazing in this case is how the White House has allowed intelligence analysts to drive policy. The very first sentence of this week's national intelligence estimate (NIE) is written in a way that damages U.S. diplomacy: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." Only in a footnote below does the NIE say that this definition of "nuclear weapons program" does "not mean Iran's declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment."

In fact, the main reason to be concerned about Iran is that we can't trust this distinction between civilian and military. That distinction is real in a country like Japan. But we know Iran lied about its secret military efforts until it was discovered in 2003, and Iran continues to enrich uranium on an industrial scale, with 3,000 centrifuges, in defiance of binding U.N. resolutions. There is no civilian purpose for such enrichment. Iran has access to all the fuel it needs for civilian nuclear power from Russia at the plant in Bushehr. The NIE buries the potential danger from this enrichment, even though this enrichment has been the main focus of U.S. diplomacy against Iran.

In this regard, it's hilarious to see the left and some in the media accuse Mr. Bush once again of distorting intelligence. The truth is the opposite. The White House was presented with this new estimate only weeks ago, and no doubt concluded it had little choice but to accept and release it however much its policy makers disagreed. Had it done otherwise, the finding would have been leaked and the Administration would have been assailed for "politicizing" intelligence.

The result is that we now have NIE judgments substituting for policy in a dangerous way. For one thing, these judgments are never certain, and policy in a dangerous world has to account for those uncertainties. We know from our own sources that not everyone in American intelligence agrees with this NIE "consensus," and the Israelis have already made clear they don't either. The Jerusalem Post reported this week that Israeli defense officials are exercised enough that they will present their Iran evidence to Admiral Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, when he visits that country tomorrow.

For that matter, not even the diplomats at the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency agree with the NIE. "To be frank, we are more skeptical," a senior official close to the agency told the New York Times this week. "We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran." Senator John Ensign, a Nevada Republican, is also skeptical enough that he wants Congress to establish a bipartisan panel to explore the NIE's evidence. We hope he keeps at it.

All the more so because the NIE heard 'round the world is already harming U.S.
policy. The Chinese are backing away from whatever support they might have provided for tougher sanctions against Iran, while Russia has used the NIE as another reason to oppose them. Most delighted are the Iranians, who called the NIE a "victory" and reasserted their intention to proceed full-speed ahead with uranium enrichment. Behind the scenes, we can expect Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to expand their nuclear efforts as they conclude that the U.S. will now be unable to stop Iran from getting the bomb.

We reported earlier this week that the authors of this Iran NIE include former State Department officials who have a history of hostility to Mr. Bush's foreign policy. But the ultimate responsibility for this fiasco lies with Mr. Bush. Too often he has appointed, or tolerated, officials who oppose his agenda, and failed to discipline them even when they have worked against his policies. Instead of being candid this week about the problems with the NIE, Mr. Bush and his National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, tried to spin it as a victory for their policy. They simply weren't believable.

It's a sign of the Bush Administration's flagging authority that even many of its natural allies wondered this week if the NIE was really an attempt to back down from its own Iran policy. We only wish it were that competent.

Labels: CIA, Congress, intelligence, Iran, NIE, proliferation

Washington Post Op-ed by John Bolton.

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.

Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of "intelligence."

Third, the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. We have lost many fruitful sources inside Iraq in recent years because of increased security and intelligence tradecraft by Iran. The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism. In a background briefing, intelligence officials said they had concluded it was "possible" but not "likely" that the new information they were relying on was deception. These are hardly hard scientific conclusions. One contrary opinion came from -- of all places -- an unnamed International Atomic Energy Agency official, quoted in the New York Times, saying that "we are more skeptical. We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran." When the IAEA is tougher than our analysts, you can bet the farm that someone is pursuing a policy agenda.

Fourth, the NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data. In the bureaucracy, where access to information is a source of rank and prestige, ramming home policy changes with the latest hot tidbit is commonplace, and very deleterious. It is a rare piece of intelligence that is so important it can conclusively or even significantly alter the body of already known information. Yet the bias toward the new appears to have exerted a disproportionate effect on intelligence analysis.

Fifth, 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."

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.

Labels: CIA, Iran, NIE, proliferation

So the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), complied from 16 intelligence agencies, declares that they, "Judge with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."

A roundup of articles include:

U.S. report says Iran halted nuclear weapons program in 2003 (NY Times)

US: Iran Still Able to Develop Nukes (Associated Press)

U.S. Finds That Iran Halted Nuclear Arms Bid in 2003 (Washington Post)

And... my favorite... a Washington Post page-1 "news analysis" (read: opinion disguised as news) stating: "A Blow to Bush's Tehran Policy"
A blow? Really? Is it?

Or... could it mean, if true -- and there's every reason to doubt, keep reading -- that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 had a lot to do with Iran halting its weapons program?

I mean, if Iran "halted a program" it means without doubt they (1) actually had a program to halt, (2) didn't halt it just for the heck of it, and (3) will likely start it back up once the international pressure decreases.

If... if... IF the NIE is true it can be reasonably argued that Iran had the same reaction to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as did Libya: They too had a nuclear weapons program which Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi officially revealed to the United Nations and ended in December 2003, in large part with thanks to Tony Blair's highlighting the writing on the wall to Mr. Qaddafi.

Now. Here's the rub. Just two years ago this same intelligence community released the 2005 NIE which declared that they "Assess with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure, but we do not assess that iran is immovable."

The NIE group, better known as the National Intelligence Council, was (apparently) wrong in 2002 when it famously quantified the amounts of WMD the United States could expect to find in Iraq, it barely mentioned Osama bin Laden and never even referenced the word "al Qaeda" in their 1997 and 1999 NIEs (the last produced before 9-11), it did not accurately assess development of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan prior to 1998, and apparently it was wrong two years ago, since, as Norman Podhoretz states, in this 2007 NIE, "they represent a 180-degree turn from the conclusions of the last NIE on Iran's nuclear program."

Thus, if the National Intelligence Council was wrong all those times why should we have confidence that they are right this time?

In other words it's difficult to say if one trusts Iran or our own intelligence community less. One wonders if other than great signal capabilities, satellite intelligence and other technological intelligence we have any spying ability (i.e., from human spies) at all.

Case in point, from the AP article above:

Some of the changes in the new report reflect the use of "open source" intelligence - public information from sources such as the news media and international organizations. An official said, for example, that photos taken at Iran's Natanz nuclear facility during U.N. inspections in 2002 were particularly useful in assessing the capabilities of the civilian uranium enrichment program.
Open sources? Great, so our federal intelligence capabilities are no different that that of you and I conducting Google Earth searches.

That doesn't leave one with much confidence in our intelligence community, does it?

But it may be that the very nature of the NIC group increases the liklihood of incompetence. Why? Because it's made up of 16 agencies who must first agree on common language prior to publication. This leads to a watered down, least common denominator of intelligence.

It's human nature: try to get 16 people (let alone agencies of people) to agree on anything and you'll generally have a fair percentage of them throw their hands in the air and collectively state "Fine! Say what you want I'm sick of arguing about it!"

So on that note, the best conclusion rests in five questions posed by Tom Joscelyn:

First, what intelligence is this assessment based upon?

Any student, or even casual observer, of the U.S. intelligence community knows that it has done a remarkably poor job of recruiting spies inside unfriendly regimes. For example, we had no meaningful spies inside Saddam's regime. That was at least part of the reason the U.S. intelligence community misjudged Saddam's WMD programs so badly. (Whatever came of Saddam's WMD, U.S. intelligence clearly did not know what was going on since the few sources it had were on the periphery of Saddam's regime.)

Reading the latest NIE does not provide, of course, any clues as to how the IC came to these conclusions. If the IC does have good sources inside the Iranian regime and its putative nuclear program, then quite naturally it would want to protect them. And we wouldn't expect to see any information about sources in a declassified "Key Judgments" such as this.

However, there are good reasons to suspect that the IC does not have good intelligence inside Iran. For example, both of the leading members (one Republican, one Democrat) of the House Intelligence Committee explained back in 2006 that we did not really know then what was going on inside Iran. And the Robb-Silberman Commission, which investigated what the IC knew about WMD programs around the world, found in 2005: "Across the board, the Intelligence Community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors. In some cases, it knows less now than it did five or ten years ago."

Understandably, the Commission refrained from discussing the specifics of the intelligence community's infiltration, or lack thereof, of both the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs. But it is a safe bet that the statement cited above applied in both cases.

Thus, we should not be confident, at all, that the IC has the type of intelligence that would allow it to make a definitive assessment one way or another. This is true no matter what conclusions the IC publishes. Who or what are the sources cited by IC? How do we know they are telling the truth? If they are members of the Iranian regime, have their so-called bona fides been established? Are they in a position to know what they claim to know? Do they have any motives to lie, or distort the truth? We should be mindful of all of these questions and more.

Second, what has changed since 2005?

As this latest NIE notes, its conclusions are at odds with what the IC believed in 2005. The last page of the declassified Key Judgments notes significant differences between what the IC believed in 2005 and what it is saying now. In 2005, the IC noted: "[We] assess with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure, but we do not assess that Iran is immovable." Now the IC says, "…we do not know whether (Iran) currently intends to develop nuclear weapons." So, in 2005 the IC was sure that Iran was determined to build a nuclear weapon and now it is not sure at all. This is a profound change in opinion and, at a minimum, does not inspire confidence that the IC can get this story right. After all, if the IC's judgments can change so drastically in two years time, why should we believe any of its pronouncements one way or the other?

What is the basis for this flip-flop? What has been learned in the meantime to warrant such an about-face?

Third, how did the IC draw its line between a "civilian" nuclear program and a military one?

In the very first footnote the authors of the NIE explain: "For the purposes of this Estimate, by 'nuclear weapons program' we mean Iran's nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran's declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment."

So, is the IC then assuming that Iran's "declared civil work" is necessarily benign? One of the key issues with respect to Iran's "civilian" nuclear program is its capacity, with some tweaking here and there, to be used for military purposes. For example, according to the New York Times in early 2006, the IAEA concluded that there was evidence suggesting "links between Iran's ostensibly peaceful nuclear program and its military work on high explosives and missiles." Indeed, the authors of the NIE explicitly recognize the possibility of the civilian program being diverted for military uses:

Iranian entities are continuing to develop a range of technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so. For example, Iran's civilian uranium enrichment program is continuing. We also assess with high confidence that since fall 2003, Iran has been conducting research and development projects with commercial and conventional military applications--some of which would also be of limited use for nuclear weapons.
So, then, the NIE's conclusions apply strictly to Iran's alleged halt of its military and clandestine programs. As we know, however, uranium enrichment is the most important component of developing the bomb and Iran indisputably has the capacity. (Again, with some tweaking, Iran can use its declared enrichment facilities at some point to make weapons-grade material.) But, this leads us to ask another simple question.

Fourth, how does the IC know that Iran has stopped its clandestine activities with respect to developing nuclear weapons?

Returning to the first footnote of the NIE's Key Judgments, the IC argues that, in 2003, Iran ceased its "nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work." How does the IC know that Iran did not continue working on "weapon design and weaponization" covertly?

Does it think that its sources are so good that they can rule out that possibility? Remember that Iran carried out much of its work on its nuclear program clandestinely for the better part of two decades. And some of these clandestine activities involved dealings with the AQ Khan network, the scope of which was not fully appreciated until it had already been doing business for years. How can the IC be sure that Iran's clandestine activities ceased in 2003?

Note that the IC argues that Iran supposedly gave up its covert uranium conversion and enrichment work. How does the IC know that? Are we to believe that the IC's penetration of Iran's intelligence services, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and other parties controlled by the mullahs is so iron-clad that it can know this with certainty? Furthermore, is it possible that Iran did not need to do said work covertly because it has been openly enriching uranium?

Fifth, how does the IC know what motivated Iran's alleged change in behavior?

The NIE claims that "Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure." How does the IC know what motivated Iran's alleged change in behavior? Did the Iranians tell someone? Is this coming from clandestine sources? Assuming for the moment that Iran really did halt its program, are we to believe that a substantial U.S.-led military presence in Afghanistan and in Iraq (or potential presence in Iraq, depending on when in 2003 this change supposedly occurred), had nothing to do with Iran's supposed decision? That is, are we to believe that U.S. led forces on Iran's eastern and western borders had nothing to do with Tehran's decision-making process?

We are left with a number of important questions. And without knowing the answers to these questions, the IC's opinions are best viewed with a skeptical eye.
Skeptical indeed!

Labels: CIA, foreign policy, intelligence, Iran, NIE, proliferation

Last week it sounded like former White House press secretary Scott McClellan decided to make a cheap buck or two by claiming that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Karl Rove were "involved" in "leaking" Valerie Plame's name to the media. By the end of the holiday weekend, however, it seemed that not only did McClellan not do so, but rather the mainstream media may have quoted McClellan's book excerpts - released by his publishing company - without knowing whether or not the topic was Plame.

Even so, for a moment, let's assume that he did. Regardless, the logic, as always, would be tortured and Orwellian.

"I had unknowingly passed along false information [about Plame]," McClellan wrote. "And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself." ...

But White House sources have long said that Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, allowed McClellan to suggest day after day that they had no involvement in the publication of the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Later testimony showed that they did, although neither was the original source of the leak.
Whoa, whoa... "although neither was the original source of the leak."

Question: how does one "leak" something that has already been leaked? Answer: you can't. You can't lose your virginity twice either. So there's nothing false about saying one had no involvement in a leak if the leak in question had already sprung.

This whole thing is smoke and mirrors. The Bush teams' only fault is their pathetic attempt in playing defense. And it's also obvious that no law was broken by the "leaking" of Plame's name. How do we know this? Because the the guy who admitted to leaking Plame's name to columnist Bob Novak -- Deputy Sec. of State Richard Armitage -- the guy who started this whole mess, isn't in a jail cell beside Scooter Libby.

Armitage has never been charged. Never been investigated. Indeed, one never even hears the Plame-lovers mention Armitage's name, let alone vilify him with the same voracity they did Libby, who is currently serving prison time for committing perjury about a crime he didn't commit!!

It's pretty difficult to argue that a crime has been committed when there's no prosecution of the person who committed the supposed crime.

Beyond the previously ruined credibility of Plame and hubby Joe Wilson, then, this is about one thing: making money.

If it turns out that McClellan is pointing the finger, one could wager he simply saw how much Plame and Wilson have gained while jetsetting across the country for book deals, Vanity Fair covers, a movie deal, television interviews, etc., and naturally wanted a share.

Labels: CIA, media bias, PlameGate, Wilson

[Washington Post] A Lebanese national who fraudulently gained U.S. citizenship through a sham marriage managed to obtain sensitive jobs at both the FBI and CIA, and at one point used her security clearance to access restricted files about the terrorist group Hezbollah, according to court documents filed yesterday.

U.S. officials say there is no evidence that Nada Nadim Prouty, 37, passed secrets to Hezbollah or to other groups the United States considers terrorist. But Prouty's ability to conceal her past from two of the nation's top anti-terrorism agencies raised new concerns about their vulnerability to infiltration.

"It is hard to imagine a greater threat than the situation where a foreign national uses fraud to attain citizenship and then, based on that fraud, insinuates herself into a sensitive position in the U.S. government," said U.S. Attorney Stephen J. Murphy in a statement announcing a plea agreement with Prouty.

...In 2000, she accessed restricted FBI computer files on Hezbollah, according to court documents, apparently to see whether family members had been linked to the Lebanon-based group. Prouty also improperly took home unspecified classified documents, according to her plea agreement. Justice officials said there is no indication that the classified records were shared with others. ... Prouty's case is also notable because of her ability to gain improper access to files in the Automated Case System, the FBI's antiquated computer network. The FBI has bungled repeated attempts to replace ACS and is unlikely to have a new system in place for several years.
According to the article Prouty "passed an FBI polygraph test with 'no deception noted.'" This isn't some sophisticated trained foreign spy, this is just an interpreter.

To say that this leaves one feeling disconcerted about the competencies of our intelligence services is an understatement. As others have often noted, how was John Walker Lindh able to infiltrate al Qaeda but the CIA or FBI cannot? The excuse back then was that it would take time to rebuild our intelligence services. Well, here it is six years after 9-11 and the intel community seems to have far more success in leaking classified documents to The New York Times than it does doing it's job. Bush may come and go but unfortunately it seems we're stuck with these bozos forever.

Labels: CIA, FBI, intelligence, war on terror

Who outed Valerie Plame? Her employer: the CIA.

Here's an interview CNN had with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who previously admitting "leaking" Plames name to reporter Bob Novak. Gotta love how this important detail is only now revealed.

BLITZER: You will hear it. I want you to listen to what she said.

VALERIE PLAME WILSON, AUTHOR, "FAIR GAME": (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) Mr. Armitage did a very foolish thing. He has been around Washington for decades. He should know better. He's a senior government official. Whether he knew where exactly I worked in the CIA, he had no rights to go talking to a reporter about where I worked. That was strictly off-limits. (END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: Those are strong words from Valerie Plame Wilson.

ARMITAGE: They're not words on which I disagree. I think it was extraordinarily foolish of me. There was no ill-intent on my part and I had never seen ever, in 43 years of having a security clearance, a covert operative's name in a memo. The only reason I knew a "Mrs. Wilson," not "Mrs. Plame," worked at the agency was because I saw it in a memo. But I don't disagree with her words to a large measure.

BLITZER: Normally in memos they don't name covert operatives?

ARMITAGE: I have never seen one named.

BLITZER: And so you assumed she was, what, just an analyst over at the CIA?

ARMITAGE: Not only assumed it, that's what the message said, that she was publicly chairing a meeting.

BLITZER: So, when you told Robert Novak that Joe Wilson, the former U.S. ambassador's wife, worked at the CIA, and she was involved somehow in getting him this trip to Africa to look for the enriched uranium, if there were enriched uranium going to Iraq, you simply assumed that she was not a clandestine officer of the CIA.

ARMITAGE: Well, even Mr. Novak has said that he used the word "operative" and misused it. No one ever said "operative." And I not only assumed it, as I say, I've never seen a covered agent's name in a memo. However, that doesn't take away from what Mrs. Plame said, it was foolish, yeah. Sure it was.
How the heck is someone a "covert agent" if their name is appearing on unclassified public CIA memorandums? Answer: she wasn't.

The bottom line is if Plame were covert or classified or however you want to term it her employer went to no lengths to keep her status unknown (and neither did the camera-hogging Plame or Joe Wilson for that matter). The CIA dropped the ball, and once they did, once her name got out, they used every resource to shift the blame of their own incompetence. Meanwhile Scooter Libby sits in jail for "lying" about a crime he didn't actually commit and the Wilson-Plame family makes several million in publicity circuit book tours.

Labels: CIA, intelligence, Iraq, PlameGate, Wilson

Labels: CIA, defending liberty, intelligence, interrogation, TSP

Here's the introduction of a 60 Minute's expose' about an Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball" who was a primary figure in the run up to our intelligence failures in Iraq:

[60 Minutes] Did Saddam Hussein have weapons of mass destruction? No, he did not. We've known that for some time now.
Say again?

So, we've now gone to the incredulous statement that Iraq never had WMD?

It's one thing to say that Iraq had WMD, but that between 1991 to 2003 it had decayed, or UN inspectors must have found the vast majority of it, or it had become too minuscule to measure, or it has been hidden or transferred. But it's quite another thing, a disingenuous thing, to say that Iraq NEVER had WMD.

Tell that to the Kurdish victims of Halabja, etc., under Saddam Hussein's well-documented Anfal campaign.

I won't document all the arguments here. But the fact of the matter is that one cannot positively know what did or did not happen to them, or how our intelligence was so wrong.

It does, however, bear mentioning that former top U.S. weapons inspector David Kay, who investigated the intel failure, himself thought Iraq had WMD prior to invasion, that every Western government (including France and Germany) thought Iraq had WMD prior to invasion, and that "We have discovered hundreds of cases, based on both documents, physical evidence and the testimony of Iraqis, of [WMD] activities that were prohibited under the initial U.N. Resolution 687 and that should have been reported under [resolution] 1441, with Iraqi testimony that not only did they not tell the U.N. about this, they were instructed not to do it and they hid material."

So to say that Iraq never had WMD is patently dishonest.

But let's move on to 60 Minute's source for their story, former CIA agent Tyler Drumheller, someone long ago discredited as a typical Bush opponent who makes an allegation that later is disproved due to a lack of tangible evidence.

In this case Drumheller used a reverse standard of proof to label former CIA Director George Tenet a liar. According to Drumheller, Tenet had to have seen official correspondence from German officials that Iraq's inside source, Curveball, was simply not reliable. However, Drumheller has a history of not being able to back his comments. The burden of proof lies with Drumheller to prove something nefarious occurred, not on Tenet to prove it did not.

In 2005, 60 Minutes interviewed Drumheller, who claimed that Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabri had told the US, Tenet and the Bush administration that Iraq had no WMD.

But it was Drumheller who could not back his claims. From Ryan Scarborough's book Sabotage:

In fact, the opposite is true. Senator Pat Roberts directed the Intelligence Committee staff to collect every bit of reporting the CIA owned on Sabri's information. The staff found that Sabri, rather than debunking the idea that Iraq had WMD, actually affirmed that it did.

"All of the information about this case so far indicates that the information from this source was that Iraq did have WMD programs," Roberts wrote in the fall of 2006. Tenet, by then no longer CIA director, privately told the committee that Drumheller "mischaracterized" Sabri's information. Roberts obtained copies of the CIA's reporting on Sabri at the time. The documents stated the exact opposite of what Drumheller had said on 60 Minutes. Iraq was "aggressively and covertly" developing a nuclear weapon, Sabri said, and was currently producing chemical weapons.

Drumheller's associates considered him a compulsive liar."
It gets better. Scarborough directly interviewed German intelligence officer regarding the claim Drumheller made that Germany had warned Tenet about Curveball.

He said he never used the word "fabricator" nor said most of the things attributed to him by Drumheller. There is no record of any memo in which Drumheller recounted for this interview for anyone at the CIA.

In his memoir, Tenet takes on Drumheller directly, recounting times when Drumheller issued allegations that did not match the facts. Tenet wrote that if the German counterpart had actually said these derogatory things about Curveball, and Drumheller had reported them, it would have dramatically changed the Iraq NIE then in progress.

But there is no Drumheller report. Tenet said neither Drumheller or any other official told him of such a conversation. "No such report was disseminated, nor was the issue ever brought to my attention," Tenet wrote. "In fact, I've been told that subsequent investigations have produced not a single piece of paper anywhere at CIA documenting Drumheller's meeting with the German." He said that the first he ever heard of Drumheller's German story was when he was questioned by the Robb-Silberman Commission.

...No CIA employee recalls ever seeing such a redacted version [of Colin Powell's 2003 UN Iraqi WMD speech].

Drumheller told the commission he called the deputy CIA director's office to make an appointment to discuss Curveball. The deputy director's assistant said no such call ever took place.

Drumheller told the commission he subsequently did meet with deputy CIA director John McLaughlin and warned him that Curveball was a fabricator. McLaughlin said no meeting took place. There was no entry about meeting with Drumheller in his official calendar.

...In short, no one remembers the meetings or conversations Drumheller says he had on Curveball."
Of course, that won't stop CBS from using Drumheller as a credible source. Like Dan Rather's "fake but accurate" documents proof need not matter, just so long as it fits into the mainstream media's predetermined storyline.

Labels: CIA, Iraq, media bias, proliferation

[ABC NEWS] For all the debate over waterboarding, it has been used on only three al Qaeda figures, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials. As ABC News first reported in September, waterboarding has not been used since 2003 and has been specifically prohibited since Gen. Michael Hayden took over as CIA director.

Read the rest.

And while we're on the subject, Max Boot comments on a recent American Enterprise Institute study that finds that "France has become the most accomplished counterterrorism practitioner in Europe." Yes, that France.

I've blogged about that before, here (See: Jacques Bauer)

The basis of author's Reuel Marc Gerecht and Gary Schmitt is that France long ago had all the so-called intrusive antiterror procedures, and even more, than we in the US currently debate, and the French Republic has nonetheless survived just fine.

The last office, whose most famous holder is Jean-Louis Bruguière, was created in 1986 and is utterly without parallel in the American system, because it gives a single magistrate the power to use both intelligence and police services to stop terrorists before they strike. Magistrates even have the power to lock up French citizens when there is not enough evidence to convict them of a crime.

For all their carping about America's supposed civil-liberties abuses, the French have concentrated more power in the hands of their counterterrorism officials than we have. And it's paid off. Gerecht and Schmitt conclude:

"We underscore the power of the French state since so much post–Patriot Act commentary in the United States suggests that enhanced police powers—for example, the sequestration of terrorist suspects without immediate access to attorneys, or the use of wiretapping and physical surveillance that falls far short of 'probable cause' of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) standards—are counterproductive to counterterrorism efforts since they corrode our collective trust in the law and are ineffective in any case."
In fact, as they stress, the kind of steps the French take work. And yet in the more than twenty years since this system was created, "France has not gone down the slippery slope into tyranny. France's society, its politics, and many of its laws have actually become much more liberal and open."

Labels: capitulation, CIA, Congress, democrats, France, intelligence, interrogation, TSP, war on terror

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy opines that Bill and Hillary Clinton's position on torture and interrogation are a lot more vague than that of attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey.

As is the senator's [Hillary Clinton's] wont (see, e.g., myriad positions on Iraq, Iran, illegal immigration, etc.), she has since flipped from this flop — just in time for a candidates' debate before a base inherently hostile to such flashes of common sense. But she clearly made the remarks. It was thus jarring to find her announcing opposition on Monday to Judge Michael Mukasey's nomination to become the next attorney general because, as Sen. Clinton explained, "I am deeply troubled by Judge Mukasey's continued unwillingness to clearly state his views on torture and unchecked Executive power."

As it happens, Judge Mukasey's views on torture and "unchecked Executive power" are a lot clearer than Hillary Clinton's.

...So Judge Mukasey has essentially said that waterboarding might be torture and would, in any event, be illegal in all but the most dire emergencies. Senator Clinton, to the contrary, has said a president could order not just waterboarding but torture, despite a congressional statute and treaty obligations that brook no exceptions. Yet, Democrats are questioning Mukasey's fitness even as they trip over themselves to hop aboard Clinton's bandwagon.
Read the rest. The Democrats' hypocrisy on intelligence and surveillance know no bounds.

In addition, McCarthy highlights Bill Clinton's recent comment to "permit the president to make a finding [a torture warrant]," and that Clinton's Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick testified to Congress in 1994 that "the president [Bill Clinton] has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes."

So remember the rule. Democrats can torture and spy without warrants to protect national security. But Republicans are criminals if they attempt to do the same.

Labels: CIA, Clinton, democrats, Hypocrisy, intelligence, surveillance, TSP

A former member of Bill Clinton's National Security Council, Daniel Benjamin, debunks several myths promoted in large part by Hollywood's latest movie titled "Rendition."

With hearings in Congress, legal cases bouncing up to the Supreme Court and complaints from Canada and our European allies, the issue of rendition is everywhere. There's even a new, eponymously titled movie in a theater near you, starring Reese Witherspoon as a bereft wife whose innocent husband gets kidnapped and Meryl Streep as the frosty CIA chief who ordered the snatch. Like most covert actions and much of the war on al-Qaeda, the practice is shrouded in mystery -- and, increasingly, the suspicion that it's synonymous with torture and lawlessness.
In fact, the term "rendition" in the counterterrorism context means nothing more than moving someone from one country to another, outside the formal process of extradition. For the CIA, rendition has become a key tool for getting terrorists from places where they're causing trouble to places where they can't. The problem is where these people are taken and what happens to them when they get there. As a former director for counterterrorism policy on the National Security Council staff, I've been involved with the issue of rendition for nearly a decade -- and some of the myths surrounding it need to be cleared up.

1. Rendition is something the Bush administration cooked up.

Nope. George W. Bush was still struggling to coax oil out of the ground when the United States "rendered to justice" its first suspect from abroad. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan authorized an operation that lured Lebanese hijacker Fawaz Younis to a boat off the coast of Cyprus, where FBI agents arrested him. (Younis had participated in the 1985 hijacking of a Jordanian plane and was implicated in the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, which left a U.S. Navy diver dead.) President George H.W. Bush approved the kidnapping in 1990 of Mexican physician Humberto Alvarez Machain, who was believed to be involved in the torture and killing of a Drug Enforcement Administration official. Nothing says that renditions can involve only suspected terrorists; Israel's abduction of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 could be called a rendition, though the term was not yet in use.

Beginning in 1995, the Clinton administration turned up the speed with a full-fledged program to use rendition to disrupt terrorist plotting abroad. According to former director of central intelligence George J. Tenet, about 70 renditions were carried out before Sept. 11, 2001, most of them during the Clinton years.

2. People who are "rendered" inevitably end up in a foreign slammer -- or worse.

Actually, that's not a foregone conclusion. Alvarez was brought to the United States. So was Mir Aimal Kansi, who killed two CIA employees in their cars outside the agency's Langley headquarters in 1993, and Ramzi Yousef, the architect of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Both were apprehended in Pakistan, whose leaders decided that the nation would rather not have those two -- folk heroes to some -- sitting in jail, awaiting extradition. Pakistan's leaders feared that cooperating with the United States would be dangerously unpopular, so they wanted the suspects out of the country quickly. For many pro-U.S. Muslim leaders, that concern has only deepened as anti-Americanism has soared.

By my count, most renditions since 1995 have involved moving individuals from one foreign country to another -- not grabbing someone in Washington and carting them off to North Africa, as happens to Witherspoon's onscreen husband. Such operations typically occur in secret because, again, Muslim leaders (especially in the Arab world) want to shield their cooperation with Washington from their anti-American publics. The CIA has acted as a go-between, arranging the transfers and providing transportation. Usually those being rendered are not brought to the United States because, while the U.S. government may have an abundance of intelligence showing their malfeasance, it doesn't have enough courtroom evidence. There's a big difference between the two.

One other safeguard: During the Clinton years, the United States required the country that received a rendered person to have some kind of legal process against the suspect -- an arrest warrant or indictment, for example. It's not clear whether that is still the case. Perhaps Michael Mukasey, President Bush's attorney general nominee, can check.

3. Step one of a rendition involves kidnapping the suspect.

The individual may feel as though he's being kidnapped, but that's not usually what's going on. Most of the time, the person is detained by the authorities of the country he is in. They will then hand him off to the CIA, which will fly him to his destination.

In rare cases when the country of residence is a hostile one, an "extraordinary rendition" can be carried out: a covert effort to abduct the suspect and spirit him out of the country. The CIA put considerable time into efforts to capture Osama bin Laden this way from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s. Had it worked, it would have been an extraordinary rendition -- and Americans would have cheered.

4. Rendition is just a euphemism for outsourcing torture.

Well, not historically. The guidelines for Clinton-era renditions required that subjects could be sent only to countries where they were not likely to be tortured -- countries that gave assurances to that effect and whose compliance was monitored by the State Department and the intelligence community. It's impossible to be certain that those standards were upheld every time, but serious efforts were made to see that they were. At a minimum, countries with indisputably lousy human rights records (say, Syria) were off-limits. Another key difference: Renditions before Bush were carried out to disrupt terrorist activity, not to gather intelligence or to interrogate individuals.

Now, though, the Bush team seems to have dramatically eroded such safeguards. The administration has apparently sent someone to Syria, and Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen, was evidently grabbed in Macedonia and interrogated in Afghanistan in a manner that sure sounds like torture. In light of this and other revelations, the criticism that the administration has "defined down" torture looks pretty persuasive. It's probably a good bet that Congress or the next administration will reform the program, or abolish it outright.

5. Pretty much anyone -- including U.S. citizens and green card holders -- can be rendered these days.

Not so, although the movie "Rendition" -- in which Witherspoon's Egyptian-born husband gets the black-hood treatment and is yanked from a U.S. airport and taken to a North African chamber of horrors -- is bound to spread this myth. A " U.S. person" (citizen or legal resident) has constitutional protections against being removed from the country through rendition, and there have been no incidents to suggest the contrary. In fairness, though, the ghastly case of Maher Arar -- a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who convincingly says he was detained at New York's JFK Airport, handed off to Syria and tortured -- is way too close for comfort.

Labels: CIA, civil liberties, Hollywood bias, intelligence, interrogation, media bias, Smearing the Troops, surveillance, tribunals, TSP, war on terror, wiretap

I was hesitant to post this as it's early reporting -- what's the old adage? The rough draft of history? -- and the facts could change a lot. But...

According to the Washington Post, the latest video of Osama bin Laden, first acquired by a private intelligence company and not the US government, was "leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide," resulting in a breach that "destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network." The network is named "Obelisk."

After acquiring the tape, the private firm of SITE Intelligence Group sent it to the White House to allow time for an official government response, and certainly not anticipating a leak that effectively hurt their firm. While "The precise source of the leak remains unknown," the company's founder, Rita Katz, says, "Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless."

Despite the fact that the leaker's identity and intentions remain unknown there will no doubt be persons who attempt to paint the Bush Administration as culprit, much like the often misreported Plame affair.

However, the New York Sun adds some details that the Post neglects to mentions, and how convenient at that, including that one of those "two senior officials" mentioned by the Post was none other than Deputy Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Michael Leiter -- while technically a "White House official" can anyone doubt that the Post neglected to mention him by name because they want their audience to assume it's someone like a Karl Rove (i.e., not a member of the intelligence community).

Ms. Katz yesterday said, "We shared a copy of the transcript and the video with the U.S. government, to Michael Leiter, with the request specifically that it was important to keep the subject secret. Then the video was leaked out. An investigation into who downloaded the video from our server indicated that several computers with IP addresses were registered to government agencies."

Yesterday a spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center, Carl Kropf, denied the accusation that it was responsible for the leak. "That's just absolutely wrong. The allegation and the accusation that we did that is unfounded," he said. The spokesman for the director of national intelligence, Ross Feinstein, yesterday also denied the leak allegation. "The intelligence community and the ODNI senior leadership did not leak this video to the media," he said.
Curious, eh?

Now, here's the rub, if the SITE story is legitimate there is something to which any government intelligence official cannot deny, best put by Michael Goldfarb:

This means that a small, private firm got its hands on the latest missive from Osama bin Laden before the federal government did. Think about that. The U.S. Government spends billions of dollars each year tracking the al Qaeda threat. And yet, a comparatively small, independent, and private firm got their hands bin Laden's latest message first. What does that say about the need for reform with the U.S. intelligence community?
It doesn't say much good, does it?

Merv Benson adds, "A cynic might suggest that someone in the CIA leaked it to harm the competition. It has been an agency that has a record of leaking things to harm the administration's policies and this is the type of leak that might be consistent with the prior ones."

If a private firm were besting the CIA or NSA, might it be in their best interest to undercut the competition.

Or, more likely, to embarrass the Bush administration, as the CIA attempted to do with the Plame affair, or several other examples best documented in Rowan Scarborough's book Sabotage: America's Enemies Within the CIA. (Karen Kwiatkowski, who refused to provide her Bush-bashing facts officially before the Senate, only unofficially to the media; and former CIA officer Tyler Drumheller, who threw charges at Bush on 60 Minutes only to have the official records prove him to be lying).

It's a tried and true game, according to Scarborough:

"The intelligence community, sometimes anonymously, sometimes not, would make allegations of Bush administration wrongdoing. The charges were leaked to the press. Months later, the Senate Intelligence Committee or another body would find no evidence to back up the leaks. But by then, the damage to the public's perception of the war had been done."
Having said all this, some are skeptical of the entire story because ABC News posted on their website the bin Laden video on September 6, a day before SITE claims they gave the White House the video.

How do you score something that was already scored, and therefore how can something be leaked that was already leaked?

Dr. Rusty Shackleford: "So, just because SITE's intel source got burned, doesn't mean that we've lost capability of tracking al Qaeda online."

Is it a story or not? I guess we'll find out.

Labels: CIA, intelligence

I thought this was an interesting comment by the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Chief, Vice Admiral (ret.) John Scott Redd:

What I'll tell you about bin Laden is if we knew where he was, he'd either be dead or captured. It's that simple. [He's] obviously a tough target. That whole area is a tough target. And my standard answer on OBL is: remember [convicted Atlanta Olympics bomber] Eric Rudolph. Nobody likes to hear it but, I mean, here's a guy [who was on the run] in the United States of America. We had unlimited access—the FBI, local law enforcement—and the guy hid out for an awful long time just by keeping a low profile. One reporter said the other day, "Well, gee, you've got all this great overhead stuff and various surveillance things." I said, "Yeah. I'd trade those for about three great human sources."
If a guy like Rudolph could hide in the US, imagine how long a smart terrorist could hide in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, or even in a Pakistan city that had hordes of people supporting or sympathetic of bin Laden.

We captured 9-11 masterminds Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh in large part because they were stupid and had big egos -- they were camera whores who allowed themselves to be interviewed by an Al Jazeera reporter whom was likely being tailed by Western and Pakistani intelligence services.

Don't expect Bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri to make the same mistake.

Labels: CIA, intelligence, surveillance, war on terror

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People using CIA and FBI computers have edited entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo prison, according to a new tracing program.

The changes may violate Wikipedia's conflict-of-interest guidelines, a spokeswoman for the site said on Thursday.
That's not all it violates... how about violating the trust the American public puts in the CIA and FBI to provide for the common defense and keep the baddies away instead of wasting time updating the world's first unreliable, amateur "encyclopedia"?

Just a few of many CIA screwups include: Not detecting North Korea's surprise attack in 1950. Underestimating Soviet strength and its invasions all through the Cold War. Being caught by surprise when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. India's nuclear proliferation. Pakistan's nuclear proliferation. Iran's nuclear proliferation. North Korea's nuclear proliferation. Indeed, the CIA can't win for losing - realized by UN inspectors after the Gulf War, first the CIA underestimated Saddam Hussein's WMD program in the 80s, and then they overestimated the same program prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003!

And that's not even all the detection failures regarding Islamic terrorism - 9/11, naturally, but then there's the USS Cole bombing and Khobar towers and Lebanon bombings of the US embassy and barracks in 1982 and 1983, and not foreseeing Hezbollah's kidnapping of its own people back then. In fact, by the 1990s the CIA didn't have one single human asset (spy) in Iraq. Not one.

Former CIA agent Robert Baer told reporters after 9-11 that the CIA "Beirut office has basically been closed since 1990-1991," and that "All the people in the counter-terrorism center (CIA CTC) and the FBI basically dismantled counter-terrorism over the 1990s." ...Who was president then... never mind.

I'm sure there are a slew of more unknown failures, and I'm sure there are a slew of unknown successes, but let's be honest that the CIA's reputation ain't exactly gold right now.

They'd be wise spending less time on Wikipedia and more time getting their crap together.

Labels: CIA, FBI, intelligence

CIA Director of Public Affairs Statement on New Book
July 20, 2007

CIA Director of Public Affairs Mark Mansfield issued the following statement today:

We generally don't comment on books, but we have departed from that on occasion, and have decided to do so in connection with Rowan Scarborough's new book, "Sabotage: America's Enemies Within the CIA."

CIA employees work very hard to protect their fellow citizens and to help keep America safe. They take great pride -- and take great risks -- in serving our country. They know that the intelligence they collect, analyze and deliver to policymakers, diplomats, law enforcement officers, and military commanders makes a difference, each and every day.

The premise of Mr. Scarborough's book -- that CIA employees are working to undermine our government -- is both ridiculous and offensive.
Verrrry Interesting.

By happenstance I ordered Scarborough's new Sabotage book last week and will read it all before I pass judgment on it -- I doubt if the CIA public affairs director could say the same.

Anyway, from my so-far limited understanding Scarborough's premise is not "that CIA employees are working to undermine our government," which is bait-and-switch spin from Mr. Mansfield, but rather that CIA employees let personal ideologies drive their decisions and projections.

It struck me as curious that the CIA would have a problem with Scarborough's book when so many other authors have basically stated the same of the CIA. For instance, former CIA operative Robert Baer wrote a book -- See No Evil* -- whose theme was that the CIA was run by career-obsessive, politically correct, soft and naive bureaucrats, and not persons concerned with spying and intelligence gathering.

The difference, of course, is that Baer and other authors were not conservatives. Scarborough is, and thus to CIA bureaucrats he is worthy of ad homonym attacks.

In other words, the CIA press release seems just further proof that Scarborough is actually on to something.

* If you don't know the movie Syriana (end credits) claims to be "based on the book See No Evil," which I had read in 2002. But watching Syriana I thought to myself, "I don't remember any of this from Baer's book!" So I read See No Evil again, just to see if I had forgotten. I can positively state that the book has less than 1 percent to do with Syriana. That is, the character's first name in the movie is indeed "Bob," and there is a crooked oil-man. However, in real life the oil-man was involved in a Clinton financial scandal -- and not with greedy neo-cons conducting illegal assassinations -- and Bob Baer intended See No Evil to be in part a mea culpa apology as to how he unintentionally got caught up in it.

Once again Hollywood fabricates history and promotes it as non-fiction.

Labels: Baer, CIA, revisionist history