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

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

Following up from his previous enlightening post Tom Joscelyn does a little digging on the authors of the NIE, who had very different views just a few months ago.

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.)

Labels: Iran, NIE, proliferation

Pat Dollard expands on the authors of the NIE... here's a hint, it's not so much a compilation of 16 intelligence agencies as it is a summary of that by three guys who don't like Bush.

Ever heard of dirty political tricks?

So can someone please explain something to me? The NIE’s three main authors, I’ll call them Larry, Moe, and Curly…are all former State Department officials with previous reputations as hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials. They are Tom Fingar, formerly of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Vann Van Diepen, the National Intelligence Officer for WMD; and Kenneth Brill, the former U.S. Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Larry: Kenneth Brill served as the US Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (the IAEA). This is an agency that has actually helped Iran pursue nuclear weapons. The head of the IAEA, Mohammed ElBaradei, has been called a friend by the Iranian Theocracy. Brill was either incompetent or unwilling to put an end to Elbaradei’s efforts to help Iran. Brill was let go from the State Department being replaced by Colin Powell before being rehired, despite lots of protest, public and private, as head of the National Counter-Proliferation Center by John Negroponte.

Moe: Fingar is more Libertarian than anything else and was key in leading the dissent against the Iraq WMD case. He was a State Department employee who was an expert on China and Germany — he has no notable experience, according to his bio in the Middle East and its geopolitics.

Curly: Vann Van Diepen has spent the last five years trying to get America to accept Iran’s right to enrich uranium. He also shares a lack of experience in dealing with Iran or the region.

These three stooges, with chips on their shoulders and axes to grind with the Bush administration stink of political bullshit.

And can someone please explain to me why it is that Thomas Fingar, one of the Three Stooges, testified before the House Armed Services Committee just 4 months ago saying this:

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.

So…what happened between July 11, 2007 and a week ago to cause these guys to say “Um, Iran halted pursuit of nuclear weapons in 2003.”??

I’m trying to think, but nothing happens…

And then there’s this:

Last November the NIE report was supposed to be completed, that’s November 2006. Negroponte, who had rehired Brill, if you recall correctly, resigns as DNI because of a dispute over the NIE in January, and then we capture those 6 Iranian guys in Irbil, Iraq.

The report then is supposedly “completed” in February. But on February 7th, Iranian Revolutionary Guard General Ali Reza Asgari (we’ll call him Shemp) goes to Turkey and “disppears” there. It is reported in March that he is cooperating with western intelligence. A little over a month after that, it is announced that the NIE report will be delayed a little longer.

On July 11, 2007 Fingar testifies before the House Armed Services Committee, with the “We assess that Tehran is determined to develop nuclear weapons” statement.

Then, the NIE report on Iran is released unexpectedly the other day, and these Three Stooges say that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Could this General Asgari, who supposedly “defected” be a plant to disseminate bogus info? Or could he simply have bad info? Or what? And since Asgari has been out of the loop since at least February, how accurate can his intel be, if indeed he is the puking pigeon?

Can someone explain why Fingar changed his tune from “We assess that Tehran is determined to develop nuclear weapons” in mid-July, to “Iran halted its pursuit of nuclear weapons in 2003?”

I got questions. Louie has questions. I smell a dead pig.

Labels: 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

Just last month, IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei revealed Iran had a blueprint for a nuclear warhead provided by disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan during a visit to Tehran in the 1990s.

It is this episode more than anyother that effectively renders the latest NIE moot. Perhaps 16 U.S. intelligence agencies now assert Iran cannot build a bomb until at least 2010. Butthey all assume Tehran's program is indigenous. That's a dangerous assumption, indeed. While Iranian minders usher the IAEA through the regime's declared facilities, the Revolutionary Guard could simply buy nuclear fuel or components from rogue scientists in Russia, Pakistan or Libya. The September 2007 revelation that North Korea likely supplied the Syrian government with a nuclear plant underlines this concern.
-- Michael Rubin

Labels: Iran, proliferation

[Newsbusters] The Financial Times (FT) is reporting that an Iran-bound ship seized by the United Arab Emirates last month "contained materials banned by UN Security Council resolutions 1737 and 1747, while the purchaser of the materials has been barred by the same resolutions."

Those resolutions were put in place, FT writers Simeon Kerr and Najmeh Bozorgmehr noted in their December 5 article, "to curtail its [Iran's] nuclear development programme."

Although Kerr and Bozorgmehr's Emirati government source "declined to identify the contents of the cargo or the Iranian company" that ordered them, the development is newsworthy, particularly in light of the shift in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), that now concludes that Iran stopped its nuclear program in 2003.

A search of the December 5 Washington Post found no articles similar to Kerr and Bozorgmehr's, although it's unclear if the FT reporters have an exclusive scoop.

Labels: Iran, media bias, 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

Bill Roggio has a disturbing report about Nawaz Sharif:

With the return of former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to Pakistan, a dangerous new actor has now reentered Pakistani politics. ABC News's the Blotter reports that Sharif has accepted a bribe from none other than Osama bin Laden.

The report is based on the interrogation of one Ali Mohamed, who "served as a special projects coordinator for bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al Zawahri in the mid-1990s." Based on the Blotter report, 'Mohamed was also in charge of selecting bin Laden's personal security team." This would be the Black Guard, and this posting along with the special projects coordinator position would place Mohamed at the heart of al Qaeda's inner working.

Mohamed, who is now in a U.S. prison for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, has been cooperating with the FBI and providing them with a wealth of information on the inner workings of al Qaeda. Frmer FBI agent and ABC News consultant Jack Cloonan has questioned Mohamed over a period of years and believes the information he has provided to U.S. authorities is accurate.

Cloonan says that back in 1999 Mohamed told the FBI he arranged for a meeting between bin Laden and Sharif's representatives. Following that meeting, Mohamed told Cloonan he delivered $1 million to Sharif's representatives. Mohamed said the payoff was a tribute to Sharif for not cracking down on the Taliban as it flourished in Afghanistan and influenced the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan, according to Cloonan.
Sharif, who was deposed by President Pervez Musharraf in a coup in 1999, is now being courted by Musharraf to serve as prime minister in a new coalition government. U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Anne W. Patterson is set to meet with Sharif today.

As the Blotter noted, rumors of Sharif's links to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden are not new. In 2005, Khalid Khawaja, a former Inter Services Intelligence operative, told Asia Times that Sharif and bin Laden met in Saudi Arabia in 1998. According to Khawaja, Sharif accepted cash to prevent the rise of political rival Benazir Bhutto.

After Gen Zia’s death in a plane crash (1988), elections were announced and there was a possibility that the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) led by Benazir Bhutto would win, which would be a great setback for the cause of the Afghan jihad against the USSR. The situation was discussed and all the mujahideen thought that they should play a role in blocking the PPP from winning the elections. I joined my former DG Hamid Gul and played a role in forming the then Islamic Democratic Alliance consisting of the Pakistan Muslim League and the Jamaat-e-Islami. The PPP won the elections by a thin margin and faced a strong opposition.

Nawaz Sharif insisted that I arrange a direct meeting with the Osama, which I did in Saudi Arabia. Nawaz met thrice with Osama in Saudi Arabia...

Nawaz Sharif was looking for a Rs 500 million grant from Osama. Though Osama gave a comparatively smaller amount, the landmark thing he secured for Nawaz Sharif was a meeting with the (Saudi) royal family, which gave Nawaz Sharif a lot of political support, and it remained till he was dislodged (as premier) by Gen Pervez Musharraf (in a coup in 1999). Saudi Arabia arranged for his release and his safe exit to Saudi Arabia,” he told Asia Times online.
Sharif is denying any links to the Taliban or al Qaeda. "Let me be clear I have been condemning all sorts of terrorism, whether in Pakistan or outside Pakistan," Sharif told the Associated Press. "We are moderates, we follow moderation and nothing except moderation. Remarks are made by other countries without taking (into consideration) our cooperation that we have extended in the past. To me this is unreasonable and I am disappointed."

Labels: al qaeda, foreign policy, pakistan, proliferation, war on terror

Is it just me, or might Colin Powell take the torch handoff from Jimmy Carter as the next most irrelevant but nonetheless irritating post-political voice?

KUWAIT CITY - Iran is far from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and despite U.S. fears about its atomic intentions, an American military strike against the Islamic Republic is unlikely, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday... I think Iran is a long way from having anything that could be anything like a nuclear weapon," said Powell, who was invited by the National Bank of Kuwait to speak on economic opportunity and crisis in the Middle East.
Seriously, how the heck would Powell know anything about Iran with any certainty? Our intelligence services certainly don't.

Labels: carter, Iran, powell, proliferation

Is it 1981 all over again? Might the Israeli bombing of a Syrian nuclear facility last month have had something to do with Iran's "cooperation" in Iraq?

BAGHDAD - Iran appears to be honoring an informal pledge to halt the smuggling of explosives and other weapons into Iraq, contributing to a drop of bombings by nearly a half since March, a senior US general said yesterday.

"We have not seen any recent evidence that weapons continue to come across the border into Iraq," Major General James Simmons said. "We believe that the initiatives and the commitments that the Iranians have made appear to be holding up."
Some other factors could include the US bipartisan measure to label Iran's Al Quds Revolutionary Guards force as a terrorist group.

But resource drains in a cold war, which is what we're in with Iran, works both ways. Perhaps the bottom line is that Petraeus' surge has worked enough to dissuade Iran from pouring resources into fighting Iraq. Iran's economy isn't exactly rocking right now. They have their own problems rationing gasoline and keeping their population in line. It's harder for autocracies to stay stable then it is for democracies. It requires far more resources and energy. Maybe Iran's meddling in Iraq has peaked.

Labels: Iran, Iraq, Israel, Petraeus, proliferation, syria

Investors Business Daily examines the flip side to the Pervez Musharraf regime -- there are certainly worse things. It's even more relevant given that our intelligence services haven't seemed to have corrected course in 10 years, or even since 9-11.

What would an Islamist terrorist not give to commandeer one of Pakistan's 50 or so atomic bombs?

Yet as recently pointed out by Andrew Koch, defense/security analyst with Washington's Scribe Strategies and Advisors consulting firm, to Agence France Presse: "We don't have absolute certainty we know where all of Pakistan's weapons are kept." That makes taking those sites out in such a large country more than tough.

Of the many blemishes the U.S. intelligence establishment has accrued over the years, this is one of the most glaring. Why don't we know? Our spies and surrogates should be ensconced in Pakistan's military and its intelligence service nine ways to jumu'ah.

But how could they be, what with a CIA so deficient it was shocked when India conducted an underground nuclear test in May 1998, shortly followed by a tit-for-tat underground explosion by neighboring Pakistan.

"The reporting from the CIA's station in New Delhi was lazy," as Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Tim Weiner writes in "Legacy of Ashes," a history of the CIA published earlier this year. "The warning bell never rang. The test revealed a failure of espionage, a failure to read photographs, a failure to comprehend reports, a failure to think, and a failure to see . . . a clear sign of a systemic breakdown."

The Pakistan Army, which controls the nuclear arsenal, may well be pro-Western, as experts assure us. But the country's powerful Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which the U.S. used in training, arming and funding Afghanistan's mujahedeen rebels against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, has had ties to al-Qaida from its beginnings during that era.

What power would the ISI — or extreme elements within it — have over Pakistan's nukes if things got worse there?
All relevant questions. And it should be noted: Musharraf is 64 years old. He's not getting any younger. Maybe he'll last another 20 years. Maybe 20 days. But even if not now, the time will come when we have to face the facts of a changing Pakistan.

And the criticism of our lack of intelligence capabilities, especially after already having been burnt in 1998, just bolsters one's opinion of their incompetence. Like I said a couple days ago when noting their hiring of a Hezbollah-supporter, they're experts at leaking information to the New York Times. But at recruiting spies and infiltrating enemy organizations? Not so much.

Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress are far more concerned with opposing all things Bush than they are preventing that fourth hijacked plane from slamming into their own Capital Hill building!

Brian Faughan explains:

Was it really less than a month ago that House leaders tried to pass a deeply flawed rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by running roughshod over the opposition? As we covered at the time, the House leadership version of FISA actually makes it harder to conduct surveillance of terrorists in a number of ways. For example, it requires a court order for surveillance any time a call might involve an American. Since we do not know who a terrorist may call in advance, it essentially requires a court order to target foreigners overseas.

It also subjects military intelligence to FISA--so our forces in Iraq, for example, would require a court order before being permitted to listen in on communications by suspected terrorists. It would also require intelligence agencies to compile a database of U.S. citizens potentially involved in targeted communications.

Observers of this debate will recall that when the Democrats tried to ram the bill through with no debate last month, they were stymied by a proposed 'motion to recommit' that would have said that nothing in the bill would prevent the United States 'from conducting surveillance needed to prevent Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or any other foreign terrorist organization…from attacking the United States.' Democrats complained both that the bill already contained this protection, and that they had to vote against it--which would have effectively killed the bill.

What have the Democrats learned from this experience? Not much. They have again brought their flawed FISA bill to the floor. They have not amended the bill to correct the problems it creates for intelligence agencies and they have again moved to block all amendments. The sole move they have made to ensure that this debate goes better than the first is to press all Democrats to vote against the GOP motion--no matter what it says.

Labels: Congress, intelligence, pakistan, proliferation, surveillance, TSP

Today Iranian "President" Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bragged that Iran has now built 3,000 uranium enrichment centrifuges, and are ever closer to their goal of becoming a nuclear power. When it comes to defying the so-called international community Ahmadinejad knows no bounds. And why would he, when there are never any consequences?

For example, see the reaction of the Italian premier:

Italian Premier Romano Prodi said Tuesday that Iran has every right to develop a peaceful nuclear program, while the international community has an equal right to verify its peaceful nature using the existing judicial measures.

In a speech delivered to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, on a visit to Rome, Prodi also said that Italy opposes any military action against Iran over Tehran's contentious nuclear program because such an attack could destabilize the entire Middle East.

Italy, as of this year a non-permanent member of the UN. Security Council, traditionally has good relations with Tehran and maintains a strong presence in Iran's gas market through Italian oil and gas giant Eni SpA.
Well I hear Sharia law is very "stable," Mr. Prodi. And by the way, last time I checked, the West's 60-year post-World War Two policy of "stability at any cost" is exactly what brought us to this point of illiberal despots acquiring doomsday technology.

At least the new German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, seems to recognize that potential Iranian nuclear weapons are, on the contrary, the very definition of destabilization. But when it comes to Europe those like Merkel seem to be the exception.

This is doubly true regarding the League of Perpetually Debating Unelected Corrupt Statesmen, also known as the United Nations. As with Iraq for 12 years of worthless unenforcable sanctions, the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency and the law of unintended consequences are increasing the likelihood that individual states use military force because its own incompetence.

[WSJ] So Mohamed ElBaradei finds it "distressing" that neither Israel nor the U.S. shared information with him about an apparent Syrian nuclear program before Israeli jets destroyed it on September 6. Imagine that: Not everyone is prepared to entrust the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency with their national security.

For the past year, Mr. ElBaradei has been running an independent foreign policy from his IAEA perch. People tell him he is "doing God's work" -- or so he tells the New York Times. In August, he announced a nuclear agreement he had reached with Iran's mullahs, without consulting his political superiors at the agency. Even the Europeans protested that one.

The agreement made no reference to the U.N. Security Council's demand that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment program, a demand Mr. ElBaradei himself dismisses as moot. The agreement also allowed the Iranians to dribble out information on the dozen outstanding questions the IAEA has yet to resolve.

Mr. ElBaradei has coasted on the IAEA's reputation as the authoritative source of information on the world's nuclear secrets. Yet this is the same agency that was taken by surprise by nuclear projects in Libya, North Korea and Iraq in the 1980s. And now in Syria, which in September was voted co-chair of the IAEA's General Conference.

All this is reason enough for the U.S., Israel and any other country serious about stopping nuclear proliferation to refuse Mr. ElBaradei's not-so-good diplomatic offices. Not surprisingly, the Syrians are hailing the IAEA chief for saying neither Israel nor the U.S. had provided "any evidence" to suggest Damascus was in the nuclear business. Satellite images show the Syrians have now covered their tracks in the desert.
Finally comes a similar warning from Investors Business Daily through a more historical approach: the lessons of Carter's Hostage Crisis, Reagan's Iran-Contra, and Clinton's September 11-Bosnia and Khobar Towers affairs should be seared into our collective memory. 30 years of presidency were all bitten by the false hope of Iranian reasonability.

Labels: Iran, proliferation, UN Corruption

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

[LA Times] WASHINGTON -- A senior State Department official, toughening the administration's line on Iran, said Tuesday that there was no doubt the top leaders in Tehran were directing Iranian forces that the administration is holding responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. troops in Iraq. Senior Iraq advisor David Satterfield said "there is no question in our minds whatsoever" that Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops "are very much under the direction and command of the most senior levels of the Iranian government. Full stop."

The administration has repeatedly charged that Iranian troops and agents are shipping sophisticated explosives into Iraq, training Iraqi militants and taking other actions counter to American goals. However, U.S. military officials have released no conclusive evidence that Iranian weapons and training were supplied by top authorities in Tehran, and have been careful not to say whether they believe senior or lower-level government officials are involved.

...Bruce Riedel, a former CIA and White House official, said Satterfield's comments reflected "the growing frustration the administration is feeling about this" because officials believe Tehran has not heeded warnings to scale back its alleged activities in Iraq.
And indeed, why would they when you've got every Democrat presidential candidate shouting how they'll never allow Bush to use force against Iran. Since Iran knows Bush would never have the political capital to take military action against them they have no need to negotiate, whether on the issue of killing US troops in Iraq or on nuclear proliferation!

Bush will be gone soon. American presidents come and go. But the Iranian Ayatollah and Supreme Council, pursuing the 12th Imam, will always be present.

Which brings us to Iran's new nuclear negotiator. He's a buddy of Ahmadinejad, a former member of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Force - recently officially designated a terrorist organization - and of Hezbollah - long ago designated a terrorist organization, and Holocaust denier. But of course!

[Wall Street Journal] In appointing Saeed Jalili as Iran's top nuclear negotiator with the West, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad chose a close ally whose views on many issues -- from Iran's right to build nuclear energy facilities to the Holocaust -- mirror his own.

While a flurry of prominent Iranians have criticized Mr. Jalili as a political lightweight, the midranking bureaucrat has a record of loyalty to Mr. Ahmadinejad and to the Islamic regime. He clearly stated his views on the regime's nuclear ambitions before being appointed: "Under no circumstances should Iran give up its absolute right to nuclear energy," Mr. Jalili said in an interview recently with Iran's Fars News Agency.

Many analysts believe Mr. Jalili's appointment suggests Iran is taking a less-compromising stance in the negotiations, with the new chief negotiator far less likely than his predecessor, pragmatic conservative Ali Larijani, to push Tehran toward a deal.

Mr. Jalili, 42 years old, is a graduate of the elite Imam Sadegh University, where the regime has long groomed its most senior managers and officials. Established after the revolution, it is a hybrid educational institution where theological studies are taught alongside scientific classes. Mr. Jalili fought in the Iran-Iraq war as an officer in the Revolutionary Guard Force, losing his right leg in battle. At age 24, he entered the Foreign Ministry, part of a quota of appointees from Iran's ultra-conservative Hezbollah movement. He climbed the bureaucracy there and had a stint as director of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's office. He is the author of a book titled, "Foreign Policy of (the) Prophet of Islam."

Mr. Jalili has also recently echoed one of the president's most controversial views -- that the Holocaust may not have happened. "Why won't they allow an investigation into this matter? The questions that our president has raised about this issue are all in line with human-rights discussions," he told Fars News.
Well, we do what we can: By 2012 the US starts delivery of the Joint Strike Fighter to Israel, which, according to one US official, "This plane can fly into downtown Teheran without anyone even knowing about it since it can't be detected on radar."

Let's hope it never comes to that, but the Democrats have clearly forgotten a Cold War lesson -- It wasn't until Reagan supplied Europe (amid mass protests) with the Pershing II ballistic missiles that the Soviets came to the arms negotiation table. Enemies respect strength, and walk all over talk.

Labels: Delusional Democrats, Iran, proliferation

From Mike Goldfarb

Is there a more confused issue in the public discourse than the matter of Iraq's ties to al Qaeda prior to the March 2003 invasion? I doubt it. At an ABC News blog, Jake Tapper claims that Senator Barack Obama was right to call out (in a speech he gave yesterday) Senator Hillary Clinton for saying the following back in October 2002:

"[Saddam] has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001."
Tapper writes:

As Don van Natta and Jeff Gerth have written in their book about Clinton and the New York Times, Clinton's linkage of Saddam and al Qaeda was unique among Democrats and "was unsupported by the conclusions of the N.I.E. and other secret intelligence reports that were available to senators before the vote." [Note: The vote mentioned here is, of course, the resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq]

The problem is that Sen. Clinton's statement was supported by the intelligence available, contrary to what Tapper and apparently what Don van Natta and Jeff Gerth argue (I have not read their book). It is true that the various reports mentioned above did not find any conclusive link between Saddam's Iraq and 9/11. That is absolutely true. But it is also absolutely false that these same reports did not find any link between Iraq and al Qaeda whatsoever.

In fact, as George Tenet writes in his book At the Center of the Storm, there was "more than enough evidence " of a relationship between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda, including intelligence demonstrating that more than a dozen al Qaeda agents "had found a comfortable and secure environment" in Baghdad. According to Tenet, these al Qaeda agents used their safe haven in Baghdad to move supplies to other al Qaeda agents in northeastern Iraq. Tenet cites a variety of other pieces of evidence that were contained in the CIA's reporting on this issue from the summer of 2002 through January of 2003 as well. Safe haven, discussions of collaboration, sharing VX nerve gas technology…it's all there.

So, to say that Sen. Clinton's claim wasn't supported by the intelligence available at the time is simply revisionist history. I realize that some disingenuous former intelligence officers like to now claim otherwise, but the simple fact of the matter is that the CIA did collect intelligence indicating a relationship between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda. Some analysts didn't make much of it, but as Tenet points out, others did.

The 9/11 Commission found evidence of a relationship as well. The one sentence in the final 9/11 Commission report that says there was "no evidence" that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda developed into a "collaborative operational relationship"--that is, that there was no evidence the two collaborated on attacks against Americans--has been widely trumpeted. But the Commission also found (see p. 61) that there were "indications" that Saddam's regime had assisted al Qaeda in northern Iraq, which was outside of Saddam's centralized control, but where Iraqi Intelligence still had a heavy footprint. The Commission also provided citations showing that President Clinton's administration had uncovered evidence of Iraq's cooperation with al Qaeda on chemical weapons development projects in Sudan (p. 128). Admittedly, that issue has now become greatly clouded as well. But suffice it to say that the Clinton administration had found significant evidence of a relationship before some former Clinton administration officials decided there wasn't any evidence.

Regardless, the Commission clearly did find that there was a relationship. Here is what Thomas Kean, co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission said about the matter: "There was no question in our minds that there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."

And the Commissioners are aware that there has been additional evidence of a relationship uncovered since their final report was published. Here is what Bob Kerrey, another 9/11 Commissioner, said when he was shown an Iraqi intelligence document, which has been authenticated by the U.S. intelligence community and which discussed the relationship between the two sides in the mid-1990s:

This is a very significant set of facts. I personally and strongly believe you don't have to prove that Iraq was collaborating against Osama bin Laden on the September 11 attacks to prove he was an enemy and that he would collaborate with people who would do our country harm. This presents facts should not be used to tie Saddam to attacks on September 11. It does tie him into a circle that meant to damage the United States.
ABC News has reported on the document Kerrey was discussing, by the way. (It's the second document listed in this summary here .) And, of course, all of the evidence cited above is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

So, how is it that Tapper et al. now claim that Senator Clinton's claim was groundless? I don't know. At the end of his post Tapper writes:

How could Clinton get this key point so wrong?

"My vote was a sincere vote based on the facts and assurances that I had at the time," she said in February.
But what facts and assurances?
Well, there are a bunch of places you can find these "facts and assurances," if you only look. But you are not likely to hear Sen. Clinton discussing the prewar relationship between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda any time soon. The antiwar crowd will have none of it. It has become a dogmatic point of faith that the two had nothing to do with one another. I doubt Sen. Clinton would want to incur the wrath of the antiwar echochambers by honestly recounting the facts as she knew them in October 2002.

Labels: Iraq, proliferation

Found at This Is London: "Saddam asked Bush for $1bn to go into exile." Paragraph two mentions the money. Paragraph 5 through 10 claims the report would "raise questions" as to the reasoning and cost of the multibillion dollar war.

And then, waaaaay down in paragraph 11 we get the rest of the story:

"It seems he's [Saddam] indicated he would be prepared to go into exile if he's allowed to take $1billion and all the information he wants about weapons of mass destruction."
Wooah, Woah, wait, I thought we'd been told that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction? Why's he need the information? Guess that wasn't worthy of paragraph one.

At least the Washington Post was a little more honest, mentioning that Saddam's other condition was to keep WMD information:

Less than a month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein signaled that he was willing to go into exile as long as he could take with him $1 billion and information on weapons of mass destruction, according to a report of a Feb. 22, 2003, meeting between President Bush and his Spanish counterpart published by a Spanish newspaper yesterday.

Michael Goldfarb has translated the original transcript from the Spanish newspaper El Pais:

The Egyptians are talking to Saddam Hussein. It seems he's indicated that he'd be ready to go into exile if he's allowed to take $1 billion dollars and all the information he wants about weapons of mass destruction. Gaddafi has told Berlusconi that Saddam Hussein wants to leave. Mubarak tells us that in that case, there's a strong possibility that he'd be assassinated.
Goldfarb asks reasonably, "why would Saddam attach so much importance to information on Iraq's WMD program?"

Yet if the dominant narrative is correct--that Iraq posed no WMD threat--then why did Saddam stake his life on concealing information about the program? After all, he had to think that if he did not leave Iraq, there was every chance that he would be killed during or after the invasion. Why would it have been so important to hide evidence that merely confirmed the lack of any threat?

The only logical reason for making this a condition of his agreement to exile was that he believed the program was more advanced than it really was, or that he intended to augment it. In either case, it further bolsters the case that Saddam remained a threat to the region (at least), and that it was wise to depose him.

Labels: Iraq, media bias, proliferation

Once more, a Western liberal is blinded by their concepts of diversity and multiculturalism and thus assume that all cultures are motivated by the same rewards...

ATLANTA (AP) - Former President Jimmy Carter said Wednesday that it was almost inconceivable that Iran would "commit suicide" by launching missiles at Israel.
Speaking at Emory University, Carter, who brokered the 1979 Camp David peace accord between Israel and Egypt, said Israel's superior military power and distance from Iran likely are enough to discourage an actual attack.

"Iran is quite distant from Israel," said Carter, 83. "I think it would be almost inconceivable that Iran would commit suicide by launching one or two missiles of any kind against the nation of Israel."
Carter speaks of "suicide" as though Islamic fundamentalists consider it a bad thing. But this is horribly basic misunderstanding of Islamic fundamentalists -- the very opposite is true!

For the Islamic radical there is no greater glory then giving one's life to destroy one's enemy. That which Carter terms "suicide" the Islamic fundamentalist calls "shaheed." Shaheed for the individual means personal glory in heaven, with 72 virgins and the gift of salvation for up to 70 family members (see the Shoebat quote below).

The belief of martyrdom through suicide killings is both powerful and deep, taught to the offspring when they are very young. Islamic fundamentalist rulers champion it, the parents and educators teach it, the television and media constantly propagate it.

Even if just one percent of one billion muslims are fundamentalists, and the remaining 99 percent moderate, you're still talking about 10 million Islamic radicals who believe in suicide-murder as a means to acheive eternal paradise -- and just around 25 of them killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11 using ingeniuity and deception as their weapons. Imagine what they will accomplish should they attain more tangible weapons, like nuclear power.

So it matters not that many or even most of the 71 million persons in Iran are not true believers. It only matters that the ones in charge - 12 mullahs lead by the Ayatollah, and a hand-picked "president" with military control - are.

Labels: antiwar loonies, Delusional Democrats, Iran, Islamic extremism, Israel, Moonbats, proliferation

You gotta admire the Israelis. They identify a threat and they act.

They don't cry to the U.N. They don't demand sanctions. They don't ask for permission from the Security Council. They don't try to triangulate France or China. They don't wring their hands and wonder if a potential response might not poll well with the "world community." They don't subscribe to John Kerry's "world test." They act.

After 5 months of surveillance, they identify that the terrorist-sponsoring, Lebanon-occupying, illiberal regime of Syria is importing nuclear material from North Korea... and they bomb that site.

What is Syria going to do? Conventionally attack Israel? Fat chance. Perhaps attack them by proxy via Hezbollah or another terrorist group? Well, they do that anyway, so for Israel, what's the difference? Won't the world villify them, call them war-mongers? Again, that already occurs anyway. So Israel loses nothing. The difference is that if you're going to be smeared for protecting your country, you better damn sure protect your country.

[UK Times] Results are forthcoming." The official story that the target comprised weapons destined for Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shi'ite group, appeared to be crumbling in the face of widespread scepticism.

Andrew Semmel, a senior US State Department official, said Syria might have obtained nuclear equipment from "secret suppliers", and added that there were a "number of foreign technicians" in the country.

Asked if they could be North Korean, he replied: "There are North Korean people there. There's no question about that." He said a network run by AQ Khan, the disgraced creator of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, could be involved.

But why would nuclear material be in Syria? Known to have chemical weapons, was it seeking to bolster its arsenal with something even more deadly?

Alternatively, could it be hiding equipment for North Korea, enabling Kim Jong-il to pretend to be giving up his nuclear programme in exchange for economic aid? Or was the material bound for Iran, as some authorities in America suggest?

According to Israeli sources, preparations for the attack had been going on since late spring, when Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, presented Olmert with evidence that Syria was seeking to buy a nuclear device from North Korea.

The Israeli spy chief apparently feared such a device could eventually be installed on North-Korean-made Scud-C missiles.

"This was supposed to be a devastating Syrian surprise for Israel," said an Israeli source. "We've known for a long time that Syria has deadly chemical warheads on its Scuds, but Israel can't live with a nuclear warhead."

An expert on the Middle East, who has spoken to Israeli participants in the raid, told yesterday's Washington Post that the timing of the raid on September 6 appeared to be linked to the arrival three days earlier of a ship carrying North Korean material labelled as cement but suspected of concealing nuclear equipment.

The target was identified as a northern Syrian facility that purported to be an agricultural research centre on the Euphrates river. Israel had been monitoring it for some time, concerned that it was being used to extract uranium from phosphates.

According to an Israeli air force source, the Israeli satellite Ofek 7, launched in June, was diverted from Iran to Syria. It sent out high-quality images of a northeastern area every 90 minutes, making it easy for air force specialists to spot the facility.

Early in the summer Ehud Barak, the defence minister, had given the order to double Israeli forces on its Golan Heights border with Syria in anticipation of possible retaliation by Damascus in the event of air strikes.

Sergei Kirpichenko, the Russian ambassador to Syria, warned President Bashar al-Assad last month that Israel was planning an attack, but suggested the target was the Golan Heights.

Israeli military intelligence sources claim Syrian special forces moved towards the Israeli outpost of Mount Hermon on the Golan Heights. Tension rose, but nobody knew why.

At this point, Barak feared events could spiral out of control. The decision was taken to reduce the number of Israeli troops on the Golan Heights and tell Damascus the tension was over. Syria relaxed its guard shortly before the Israeli Defence Forces struck.

Only three Israeli cabinet ministers are said to have been in the know: Olmert, Barak and Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister. America was also consulted. According to Israeli sources, American air force codes were given to the Israeli air force attaché in Washington to ensure Israel's F15Is would not mistakenly attack their US counterparts.

Once the mission was under way, Israel imposed draconian military censorship and no news of the operation emerged until Syria complained that Israeli aircraft had violated its airspace. Syria claimed its air defences had engaged the planes, forcing them to drop fuel tanks to lighten their loads as they fled.

But intelligence sources suggested it was a highly successful Israeli raid on nuclear material supplied by North Korea.

Labels: Iran, Israel, North Korea, proliferation, syria

The Big Lie that Continues About Iraq [W. Thomas Smith Jr.]

Why does everyone continue this bit about our invasion of Iraq being "based on a lie?" That in and of itself is a lie.

In terms of weapons of mass destruction (which Saddam indeed previously possessed, used, and was always seeking to develop or acquire — and no one has the definitive answer as to what might have happened to any WMDs he might have possessed prior to the invasion), we and our coalition partners acted on the best intelligence we had available at the time — and intelligence collection and processing is an art, not a science.

In terms of direct links to 9/11, there were indeed links to terrorists who linked either directly or indirectly to global al Qaeda (though, to the anti-Bush crowd, what rises to the level of a legitimate link would have to be something along the lines of a Ba'athist intelligence officer making love to Osama bin Laden in the presence of George Tenet, Robert Mueller, and film crews from the big three television networks). But don't take my word for it. READ the 9/11 Commission Report, something the Left does NOT want America to do. Talk about cherry picking facts — those birds have been cherry picking passages from the 9/11 Commission Report, and then interpreting those facts for the masses, since it was first published.

If anyone wants the actual pages that clearly show glaring evidence of "links" between pre-invasion Iraq and terrorists (and remember, after 9/11, America went to war against terrorists and those who would harbor them anywhere in the world), ask me. I'll go back and find them.

If you want other evidence, I'll share some of that too. In fact, I (and so many others) here at NRO and elsewhere already have.

But this bit about lying us into war is an absolute lie, and educated, well-informed Americans should not tolerate it any more from reps like Dennis the Menace, who say:

The fact of the matter is we are all being weakened by continuing a war that's based on a lie. This war was based on lies.
That, my friends, is a manipulative lie.

And it's a lie that works for them and they feel comfortable with: After all, it's been repeated enough times as in any lie in a successful propaganda campaign.

Ol' Robert Byrd tried to use the lie yesterday when he attempted to get General Petraeus to take the "links" bait, so he (Byrd) could force Petraeus to go back to 2003, and spend all of his time on the defensive, instead of continuing to focus on 2007 and beyond.

Fortunately, Petraeus did not take the bait.

Labels: democrats, Iraq, proliferation