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Yesterday’s New York Times story on Charles W. Freeman’s decision to withdraw his name from consideration for a top intelligence post was yet another instance of the paper trying to distance Obama from what could have been a disastrous personnel decision. Freeman, who was tapped to head the National Intelligence Council (which produces the National Intelligence Estimates that are vital to policy making), is not only rabidly anti-Israel, but has ties to hostile foreign powers that go way beyond questionable. The Times claimed, “When Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, announced that he would install Charles W. Freeman,...

WASHINGTON -- House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra has suspended a Democratic staff member because of concerns he may have leaked a high-level intelligence assessment to The New York Times last month. In a letter obtained by The Associated Press Thursday night, Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill., a committee member, said that an unidentified staffer requested the document from National Intelligence Director John Negroponte three days before the Sept. 23 story about its conclusions

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden downplayed on Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's dramatic presentation in which he accused Iran of "brazenly lying" over its nuclear ambitions. "To the best of my knowledge -- out of government, not getting the briefings -- I think this is fundamentally old news," Hayden told CNN's "New Day." On Monday, Netanyahu gave a presentation in English in which he claimed Israel has evidence that Iranian officials were "brazenly lying" when they said Iran wasn't pursuing nuclear weapons and that the Islamic Republic is keeping an "atomic archive" at a secret compound. Hayden told "New...

An Iranian nuclear scientist who returned home last week from the United States provided valuable information about the CIA, a semiofficial news agency reported Wednesday, adding that his spy's tale would be made into a TV movie

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. intelligence community on Tuesday unveiled its own secretive version of Wikipedia, saying the popular online encyclopedia format known for its openness is key to the future of American espionage. The office of U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte announced Intellipedia, which allows intelligence analysts and other officials to collaboratively add and edit content on the government's classified Intelink Web much like its more famous namesake on the World Wide Web. A "top secret" Intellipedia system, currently available to the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, has grown to more than 28,000 pages and...

U.S. spy agencies are preparing to deliver a classified briefing to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, the nation’s intelligence director said Thursday, despite deep unease among many spy officials with the real estate mogul’s pro-Russian rhetoric. National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper Jr. indicated that Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton are eligible to receive intelligence briefings within days of the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention.

The “Arab spring” has benefited Islamists rather than democracy advocates, while political transitions and unrest in the region have provided opportunities for terrorists to mount attacks against U.S. interests, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told lawmakers Tuesday. … “Islamist actors have been the chief electoral beneficiaries of the political openings, and Islamist parties in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco will likely solidify their influence in the coming year,” he told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in a written statement. … “Sequestration forces the intelligence community to reduce all intelligence activities and functions, without regard to impact on our mission,”...

President Barack Obama recently received a new National Intelligence Estimate report on the Iranian nuclear program, which shares Israel's view that Iran has made surprising, significant progress toward military nuclear capability, Western diplomats and Israeli officials have informed Haaretz. This NIE report on Iran was supposed to have been submitted to Obama a few weeks ago, but it was revised to include new and alarming intelligence information about military components of Iran's nuclear program. Haaretz has learned that the report's conclusions are quite similar to those drawn by Israel's intelligence community. The NIE report contends that Iran has made surprising,...

-Excerpt- The IAEA’s findings are not only an indictment of Iran, however. They also reveal the fundamental corruption of Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian diplomat who was the IAEA’s director general from December 1997 to November 2009. While his job was to administer a technocratic agency, ElBaradei repeatedly intervened to distort the inspectors’ findings. Rather than confront the Islamic Republic on its cheating, he coached Iranian officials on their public diplomacy. He also repeatedly ignored mounting evidence of secret Iranian facilities until these were publicly exposed by other means. -excerpt- The IAEA report should also embarrass Thomas Fingar, Vann H. Van...

ABC News has learned that President Obama will replace the Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair (ret.) His resignation will come as soon as tomorrow, sources tell ABC News. For several weeks President Obama has been holding serious conversations about whether to ask Blair to step down and has interviewed candidates to replace him. After a discussion this afternoon between the president and Blair on a secure phone line about the best way forward, Blair offered to resign and the president said he would accept, sources told ABC News. Multiple administration sources tell ABC News that Blair’s tenure internally...

ABC News has learned that President Obama will replace the Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair (ret.) His resignation will come as soon as tomorrow, sources tell ABC News. For several weeks President Obama has been holding serious conversations about whether to ask Blair to step down and has interviewed candidates to replace him. After a discussion this afternoon between the president and Blair in the Oval Office about the best way forward, Blair offered to resign and the president said he would accept, sources told ABC News. Multiple administration sources tell ABC News that Blair’s tenure internally has...

Michael McConnell, former director of national intelligence, warns that the threat of a cyberattack rivals nuclear weapons in terms of seriousness.The risk of a catastrophic cyberattack is approaching the gravity of the nuclear risk, according to the Bush administration's top spy. "The cyber risk has become so important that, in my view, it rivals nuclear weapons in terms of seriousness," Michael McConnell, former director of national intelligence, said Tuesday at a hearing of the Senate committee on commerce, transportation, and technology. McConnell warned in striking terms that the United States was not prepared either for cyber warfare or cyber criminals....

The United States would lose a cyberwar if it fought one today, a former US intelligence chief has warned. Michael McConnell, a retired US Navy vice admiral who served as ex-president George W. Bush's director of national intelligence, also compared the danger of cyberwar to the nuclear threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. "If we went to war today in a cyberwar, we would lose," McConnell told a hearing Tuesday on cybersecurity held by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. "We're the most vulnerable, we're the most connected, we have the most to lose....

AHMADINEJAD: 'YEP, I'M NUCLEAR!'February 17, 2010 The only man causing President Obama more headaches than Joe Biden these days is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who, coincidentally, was right after Biden on Obama's short-list for V.P.). Despite Obama's personal magnetism, the Iranian president persists in moving like gangbusters to build nuclear weapons, leading to Ahmadinejad's announcement last week that Iran is now a "nuclear state." Gee, that's weird -- because I remember being told in December 2007 that all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded that Iran had ceased nuclear weapons development as of 2003. At the time of that leak, many of...

US spy agencies evaluate that Iran has accelerated its research into creating a nuclear weapon but has yet to restart its program in full, Reuters quoted US officials as saying on Wednesday. The new estimate comes as the American intelligence community is putting the finishing touches on a revised National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was published near the end of the George W. Bush administration and that was out of line with European countries' estimates, as well as Israel's. Back in 2007, the NIE assessed that Iran had put its atomic bomb program on hold since 2003. Israel immediately rejected...

For three long years, the United States, Britain, and France kept the secret while their intelligence services shared information they had been gathering on what appeared to be a top secret underground nuclear weapons plant near Qom. At the very last minute, just four days before the allies planned to shock the world by revealing detailed information on the secret nuclear plant, the Iranian government sent a tersely worded letter acknowledging the existence of the site to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and pledged to open it for future inspections. “Someone leaked,” says Danielle Pletka, vice president of the...

Iran most likely will develop a nuclear capability far sooner than the NIE timeline of around 2015... Much of the analysis both classified and from think tanks, mistakenly presupposes Iran will only pursue an implosion device... In the mid 1970’s feeling threatened by Soviet expansion by its Cuban surrogates in Angola, the South African government started down the road to becoming a nuclear power. Similar to Iran today, they settled on the production of uranium as the fuel and developed a gun type of weapon. Between 1982 and 1989 they completed 6 lightweight (750 kg/1,650 lb) weapons with an estimated...

Back in 2007, the National Intelligence Estimate was released which all but absolved Iran of suspicions that it was on course to develop nuclear weapons. Rich Lowry writes In November 2007, US intelligence agencies wrote a National Intelligence Estimate concluding, "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." . . The 2007 NIE had a very circumscribed definition of a weapons program, but it included "covert conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work." Exactly what Qom is for. What do the Iranians have to do to convince US intelligence they have a weapons program? The...

When it comes to politicized intelligence in the Bush years, the critics may finally have a point. Perhaps the work of America’s intelligence agencies was manipulated to suit the convenience of a small group of willful officials, intent on getting their way against the better judgment of their colleagues. Except the intelligence was about Iran, not Iraq, and the manipulators weren’t conniving neocons but rather the Administration’s internal critics on the left.”

In 2008, a suspicious National Intelligence Estimate was leaked to the news media, apparently to influence the 2008 presidential elections. An NIE is the consensus view on the threats to this nation, at times on a specific topic like Iran or Iraq or al Qaeda. IN 2007 the NIE was a crass act of misinformation.