Shadow Warriors at Work On The New Iran NIE?

Flopping Aces ^ | December 4, 2007 at 6:03 PM | Curt

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I wrote yesterday on this whole new NIE story:

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FreeRepublic thread:

The New, Suddenly Correct, NIE on Iran

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Surprise surprise.  VIPS at work once again?  It smells like more leaks by the VIPS types ala Plame and friends, trying to influence either the tactics used by this Administrations to stop Iran from getting a nuke, or to influence the upcoming elections.
And now more information is coming out that bolsters the case that this was another shot over the bow of this Administration by our rogue intelligence agencies.  Kenneth Timmermann, the author of the excellent book "The Shadow Warriors" writes:

A highly controversial, 150 page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear programs was coordinated and written by former State Department political and intelligence analysts — not by more seasoned members of the U.S. intelligence community, Newsmax has learned.

Its most dramatic conclusion — that Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to international pressure — is based on a single, unvetted source who provided information to a foreign intelligence service and has not been interviewed directly by the United States.

Newsmax sources in Tehran believe that Washington has fallen for “a deliberate disinformation campaign” cooked up by the Revolutionary Guards, who laundered fake information and fed it to the United States through Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers posing as senior diplomats in Europe.

The National Intelligence Council, which produced the NIE, is chaired by Thomas Fingar, “a State Department intelligence analyst with no known overseas experience who briefly headed the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research,” I wrote in my book "Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender."

Fingar was a key partner of Senate Democrats in their successful effort to derail the confirmation of John Bolton in the spring of 2005 to become the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations.

As the head of the NIC, Fingar has gone out of his way to fire analysts “who asked the wrong questions,” and who challenged the politically-correct views held by Fingar and his former State Department colleagues, as revealed in "Shadow Warriors."

In March 2007, Fingar fired his top Cuba and Venezuela analyst, Norman Bailey, after he warned of the growing alliance between Castro and Chavez.

Bailey’s departure from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was applauded by the Cuban government news service Granma, who called Bailey “a patent relic of the Reagan regime.” And Fingar was just one of a coterie of State Department officials brought over to ODNI by the first director, career State Department official John Negroponte.

Collaborating with Fingar on the Iran estimate, released on Monday, were Kenneth Brill, the director of the National Counterproliferation Center, and Vann H. Van Diepen, the National Intelligence officer for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Proliferation.

“Van Diepen was an enormous problem,” a former colleague of his from the State Department told me when I was fact gathering for "Shadow Warriors."

“He was insubordinate, hated WMD sanctions, and strived not to implement them,” even though it was his specific responsibility at State to do so, the former colleague told me.

Kenneth Brill, also a career foreign service officer, had been the U.S. representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in 2003-2004 before he was forced into retirement.

"Shadow Warrior" reports, “While in Vienna, Brill consistently failed to confront Iran once its clandestine nuclear weapons program was exposed in February 2003, and had to be woken up with the bureaucratic equivalent of a cattle prod to deliver a single speech condemning Iran’s eighteen year history of nuclear cheating.”

Negroponte rehabilitated Brill and brought the man who single-handedly failed to object to Iran’s nuclear weapons program and put him in charge of counter-proliferation efforts for the entire intelligence community.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

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This is an Excerpt of a very lengthy read......

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

More...towards the end

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UPDATE II

Great interview by Dennis Prager of Michael Ledeen and Ronald Kessler about the NIE and Iran

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Michael's view is that this document is a policy document masquerading as a intelligence document.  Michael also notes that the real intelligence officials, not State Department diplomats (the writers of this NIE), all dissent to this document as evidenced by this segment of the document:

We judge with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years. (Because of intelligence gaps discussed elsewhere in this Estimate, however, DOE and the NIC assess with only moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran's entire nuclear weapons program.)

NIC is the National Intelligence Council:

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

More on the NIE...

[Humble Servant]

Good and important post—as I suspected, very strong reason to doubt the reliability of this report. Written by a few people who have a very strong track record of opposing the Admin. relying on a single source they’ve never been able to interview. Sounds like Global Warming Determination of Truthiness Criteria to me.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

ping!

[Enchante]

Interesting..... this raises the question of how a couple of State Dept. hacks are allowed to so dominate the process of preparing the NIE. They have managed to make it a worldwide story that “Iran stopped pursuing nuclear weapons 4 years ago!!” without any reliable basis for such a sweeping conclusion and no real grounds for confidence that nothing has changed since or will change in the forseeable future. They have a lot of the European leaders saying (and thinking) why should we even trouble ourselves with sanctions now that the USA says Iran is clean? There’s a ton of b.s. going down with the NIE, but how/why have all the intel agencies managed to allow themselves to be put in such a position??

[sauropod]

That was my assessment when I first heard about this yesterday.

I just finished the book “the Looming Tower” that detailed how the CIA did not give the FBI certain info prior to 9/11.

Also have heard and read many times about the dislike CIA has for the current Administration.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

From a link in the FA Comments :

December 04, 2007
NIE: other things going on
Richard Baehr

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Here is a my quick reflection on the top news story of the day: the intelligence community's assessment on Iran's nuclear program. 

1.  The intelligence community was unaware that Al Qaeda was about to strike on 9/11. So wrong on that one.

2. They did, however, think Iraq was in the process of completing a nuclear program. They appear to have been wrong on that one.

3. They thought Iran was on the verge of a nuclear weapons program in 2005. Now the intelligence community tells us they were wrong on that one too.  But now they are right, presumably, when they tell us that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons program in 2003.  I don't buy it. 

I think other things are going on, namely:

1. The intelligence community is  bitter for being blamed for its failure to anticipate 9/11, and for being  blamed for bad intelligence that led to  the Iraq war.

2. So the safe route is to downplay the likelihood of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. That surely diminishes the likelihood off an American military action against Iran. And the intelligence community can not then be blamed for another war, if the intelligence that led to the decision to go to war was wrong. And if they are wrong this time (and were right in 2005), and there is a nuclear weapons program? Well, it is Israel that most likely suffers, not the US  directly (in the short run).

The CIA in particular, and  the intelligence community in general, have never been very well inclined to Israel or to Jews  (try to join their ranks if you are Jewish. If you think I am wrong about this -- there is huge suspicion of dual loyalty).  Of course, this also means that if Israel,  which is less well-equipped for a sustained military operation against Iran than the US, out of necessity elects to take action alone (since they are convinced the US assessment is wrong), they will be condemned around the world  because of skepticism of the need for such an  action. And it will be more difficult for the US to give them cover, or be seen in any way coordinating with Israel in what they do.

And one final problem: it will now be far more difficult for the US and Israel to put together a more effective sanctions regime, since this may seem unduly alarmist, commercially costly to some nations and companies, and therefore unnecessary and counter-productive. So no military action, no new economic pressure, and it is all in Israel's lap, which is busy releasing terrorist killers, and offering up the West Bank to the PA for now and in time,  probably to Hamas.

Not a good day in any respect. Lost in all this is that nukes or no nukes, Iran is a bad actor. They have proven that in Argentina, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and Iraq to name a few. The will to confront them in any of these areas will also now likely fade as a result of this new assessment, suggesting that diplomacy is the appropriate way to influence behavior in Iran.

Many others weigh in:

[FlyVet]

It looks like we are again in dire need someone in Congress who will make the libs scream “McCarthyism! McCarthyism!” for the next fifty years.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

And another link from the FA Comments section:

Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Iran and Nuclear Weapons

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Today's big news item is obviously the release of the National Intelligence Estimate finding that Iran halted its nuclear weapons development program in 2003. The Washington Post argues the NIE's a blow to the Bush administration:

President Bush got the world's attention this fall when he warned that a nuclear-armed Iran might lead to World War III. But his stark warning came at least a month or two after he had first been told about fresh indications that Iran had actually halted its nuclear weapons program.

The new intelligence report released yesterday not only undercut the administration's alarming rhetoric over Iran's nuclear ambitions but could also throttle Bush's effort to ratchet up international sanctions and take off the table the possibility of preemptive military action before the end of his presidency.

Iran had been shaping up as perhaps the dominant foreign policy issue of Bush's remaining year in office and of the presidential campaign to succeed him. Now leaders at home and abroad will have to rethink what they thought they knew about Tehran's intentions and capabilities.

"It's a little head-spinning," said Daniel Benjamin, an official on President Bill Clinton's National Security Council. "Everybody's going to be trying to scratch their heads and figure out what comes next."

Critics seized on the new National Intelligence Estimate to lambaste what Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards called "George Bush and Dick Cheney's rush to war with Iran." Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), echoing other Democrats, called for "a diplomatic surge" to resolve the dispute with Tehran. Jon Wolfsthal, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, termed the revelation "a blockbuster development" that "requires a wholesale reevaluation of U.S. policy."

But the White House said the report vindicated its concerns because it concluded that Iran did have a nuclear weapons program until halting it in 2003 and it showed that U.S.-led diplomatic pressure had succeeded in forcing Tehran's hand. "On balance, the estimate is good news," said national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley. "On the one hand, it confirms that we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons. On the other hand, it tells us that we have made some progress in trying to ensure that that does not happen."

Hadley disagreed that the report showed that past administration statements have been wrong, noting that collecting intelligence on a "hard target" such as Iran is notoriously difficult. "Welcome to the real world," he said.

The left-wing blogosphere is having a field day with the NIE report (see Memeorandum). (Glenn Greenwald's got a rabidly (radical) anti-Bush post on the affair, "Our Serious Foreign Policy Geniuses Strike Again.")

I'm going to take a closer look at the full report, but I find the conclusions odd, based on my own reading of journalistic and scholarly sources on Tehran's march to weapons capability.

Just Sunday, Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins - authors of The Nuclear Jihadist - published a penetrating essay warning of the threat from Iran's development program:

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

We clearly have an infestation problem......in the bureaucracy...

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Editorial from the NY SUN:

The Van Diepen Demarche

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The document released yesterday buys into this line, but contains so much hedging that it will take months to sort out what the analysts are implying in the way of policy.

Take this beauty: We judge with moderate confidence Iran probably would be technically capable of producing enough (Highly Enriched Uranium) for a weapon sometime during the 2010-2015 time frame. The paragraph goes on to note that the State Department believes they won't enrich the uranium until after 2013, but that all agencies recognize the possibility that this capability may not be attained until after 2015.

As one former senior intelligence officer told our Eli Lake yesterday, this is like submitting a report saying the sun will come up tomorrow unless it doesn't. There is also the problem that the intelligence estimate mentions the nuclear weapons program prior to 2003 but fails to give an indication of how advanced the weapons program was at the time.

* * *

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

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

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

See #12.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Time to plug this in here.....

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There is a book (now available in paperback ):

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Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left
(Hardcover)
by David Horowitz

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And reviews:

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Editorial Reviews

Rich Lowry, Editor National Review

David Horowitz is synonymous with pyrotechnics. A historian and polemicist of the first order, he is paid the ultimate compliment --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Davis Hanson, Author, Ripples of Battle

An original look at those who want us to fail in the Middle East, both at home and abroad. The --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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See all Editorial Reviews

Fascinating Analysis of Leftist Goals, August 13, 2006

Reviewer: N. Sincerity - See all my reviews

A former 1960s radical, Horowitz is well-acquainted with the Leftist mindset. In this book, he strives to explain the modern alliance between left wing progressivists and radical Islamofascists. He argues that this alliance is based on a common desire to destroy Western capitalism. Leftist sympathy with Islamofascist ideas makes no sense from an intellectual point of view, given that countries ruled by radical Islamists are among the most racist, sexist, theocratic states in the world today. However, Leftists have recognized that they can benefit politically from destructive terrorist attacks on the Western world. A West under attack can be made to turn on its leaders in fear and desperation (as they did in Spain after the Madrid train bombings). Only once people reject current government structures can the Left execute its anti-capitalist revolution and build a new reality that mirrors the Leftist view of utopia.

The complete and utter idealogical hypocrisy of the Islamofascist-Leftist alliance is distressing, but as Horowitz reminds us,

Leftists radicals truly believe the ends justify the means.

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[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

see #14.

[PhilDragoo]

The alliance of leftist moles and wahabbi disinfomenters has coated the runways with snake oil--

--but I announce tonight, December 7th, a date which has significance with others who misunderestimated us--

--that our forces thrust-vectored vertically and are at this moment engaged in breaking ground for a new Wal-Mart in Natanz.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

ROFL!...Wal mart expands...LOL!

[HereInTheHeartland]

“a single, unvetted source who provided information to a foreign intelligence service and has not been interviewed directly by the United States.”

I would hope that we are not that stupid...

[NewsBee]

Very interesting post...thanks.

I have “Shadow Warriors” on my Christmas wish list.

[Matchett-PI]

bttt

Laurie Mylroie, “How the CIA.....”, etc.:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=laurie+mylroie+free+republic+matchett-pi&spell=1