Posted on 12/04/2007 8:31:53 PM PST by jrooney
Wild Speculation Alert: I have listed a lot of coincidental and circumstantial evidence in this post folks. I feel compelled to warn everyone when I see links to this NIE and Valerie Plame!
It seems the NIE was NOT a consensus view of the US Intelligence Community but a hack job by some folks with possible political aspirations (wonder what CNN debate these folks will turn up in):
A highly controversial, 150 page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Irans 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.
H/T Reader Kathie. No NIE Key Judgments would EVER be based on a single source that had not been vetted. Even the Israelis believe Iran has restarted their weapons program. Is someone trying to pull a Curveball on the US again? I mean this sounds like your classical slam dunk - doesnt it? Well there are political animals sprinkled all through the Federal Government - and this one just went too far:
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 Departments Bureau of Intelligence and Research, I wrote in my book Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender. [Editors Note: Get Shadow Warriors free go here now.]
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.
Yeah, like there is no bond between Chavez and Castro. I am looking into the names of the folks behind this NIE. They look to be targets of the left most of the time, but I did find some interesting points. It seems Fingar is more of an Academic than one would suspect:
Six months later, Director George Tenet delivered the CIAs conclusion in testimony before the Senate: Contrary to its own earlier analysis, the CIA now believed that North Korea would test an intercontinental missile in the near future. In response to this new threat, the Clinton administration earmarked $6.6 billion over five years to develop a missile-defense system.
Over at the State Departments Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), analysts argued that the North Koreans were much farther off than the CIA believed. North Korea could potentially threaten the United States within a decade only if it abandons its current moratorium on long-range missile flight testing, Tom Fingar, then-acting principal deputy assistant secretary of INR, testified before Congress in February 2001. Although the White House and Congress accepted the CIAs analysis, INR ultimately proved to be correct. In the five years since Tenets testimony, North Korea has yet to test an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Second, INR gets a different kind of analyst. The CIA, under the gun to staff up mightily after its ranks were thinned by budget cuts in the 1970s and 1990s, tends to recruit kids right out of college and train them in their new specialties. (All new CIA hires must be under 35 years of age, although that requirement is occasionally waived.) And while the CIAs young analysts occasionally travel to their countries of responsibility and bone up by reading at their desk, they have little first-hand experience of their regions. INR couldnt be more different. Among the civil servants who make up two-thirds of its staff are many scholars lured out of the academy who come with years of knowledge. Fingar is one of them: He spent a decade-and-a-half as a scholar at Stanfords U.S.-China relations program, speaks fluent Mandarin, and has traveled widely in China. The other third of INRs staff are Foreign Service officers rotating through who usually have spent several diplomatic tours in the country or region they are focusing on at INR, and who thus have both a reservoir of knowledge about its personalities and history, and a deep well of personal contacts.
Whoever wrote this really had it wrong on North Koreas intercontinental ballistic missile tests - they have been trying. Just not succeeding. But one thing is clear, Fingar is a hang-on from the Clinton days. And everyone should recognize the initials INR from the Plame Games.
So what about Kenneth Brill? Well, he also has some interesting intersections with Plame and Wilson - he worked with Joe Wilson at State. More than that he claimed in 2005 that Iran has lied to fit the facts on its nuclear weapons programs:
Following disclosures of previously undeclared nuclear activities, in March 2004, Brill said, The Iranians change their stories to fit the facts. He added, I think its striking that the more the agency learns, the more the Iranians have to change their stories, and he predicted the IAEA would have to deal with Iran for many years to come.
Needless to say he too is a Clinton holdover. My guess is we will discover these folks linked to the last big INR/CIA intel leak - the Wilson claim that Bush and Cheney used forged documents to go into Iraq. The timing is way too similar.
Update: More here on Brill and Fingar and their opposition to Bush:
DNI Negroponte is appointing Kenneth C. Brill, a frequent antagonist of Bush administration hardliners on policies toward North Korean and Iraq, to the new post of director of the National Counterproliferation Center, an Executive Level II job that outranks undersecretaries, the Washington Post reported.
Is the timing of these old Clinton hands coming out with this stuff tied to the coming election? Hmm, .
Update: From this tidbit I would bet Fingar and Plame crossed paths many times:
Thomas Fingar, like a number of members of John Negropontes inner circle, hails from the State Department. He led the departments intelligence unit, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), which raised some of the strongest objections to the determination by the CIA and others that Iraq was trying to build nuclear weapons rather than enhancing its conventional arsenal. The twist of fate in Fingars new job will not be lost on intelligence observers.
Recall Plame was heading up the entire Intelligence Communitys Joint Task Force on Iraq and WMDs at the time I believe Fingar was at INR. If Fingar was one of those few, like Plame, claiming Iraq was NOT attempting to acquire nuclear weapons then they would become fast allies in the small IC world. These two people rubbed shoulders - trust me. It is no secret the INR Fingar led played such a central role in Wilsons trip as well. Coincidence? And now we come back to the big mystery of the Wilson trip to Niger - why DID the IC debrief Joe Wilson at his house with Valerie when he came back from Niger? Why not bring him in? And who were the two INR/CIA folks at the debriefing (and possibly provided corroboration to the Kristof pieces when Joe was still anonymous)?
The dead give-away was its wording... it sounded like it came from foggy-bottom.
= = =
THAT’S RIGHT! Hadn’t thought of that. But there is a distinct flavor of such writing on the part of those suicidal idiots.
Yeah I saw Mr. BOR tonight and he seemed to be worried about the NIE being bad only because of what the Global US haters would think!
John Bolton will name the pervs in this and help unravel the stupidity of the failed DHS/Intelligence RATS!
Have you checked the info at the link to Strata Sphere? Thought you might find it interesting.
Thanks for the ping
Scary stuff.
I think this thing is timely for kicking the Iran can down the road to the next administration. I hope that our folks KNOW that Iran will not have a nuke before the next administration has time to try to deal with it. Of course if the next is Dem it won’t be dealt with until Iran “deals with” us.
The Dems think that when they are in power things will all be hunky dory because the Islamists are their very firmest allies in the war against Bush. Libs of all types are so short sighted that they cannot consider the possibility that those fine allies will “betray” them. Has there ever been such a major one-way Alliance before?
“Embarrassment” is a terribly thin euphemism.
Bush seems to think this “NIE” is just peachy. It gives him the excuse to put off the necessary to the next administration. He doesn’t have to deal with it. Maybe he’s saying, Hey Hillary! your football!
Reagan was a lot more perceptive than Bush. He pretty much bypassed the CIA and State.
Cheers!
No, the problem is, this will come back to haunt US in the long run.
High Volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel. or WOT [War on Terror]
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The good news is that one of the first Iranian nukes will be headed for DC. They will be doing us a favor by cleaning out all of the traitors.
Thanks for the ping!
As recently as 2005, the consensus estimate of our spooks was that “Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons” and do so “despite its international obligations and international pressure.” This was a “high confidence” judgment. The new NIE says Iran abandoned its nuclear program in 2003 “in response to increasing international scrutiny.” This too is a “high confidence” conclusion. One of the two conclusions is wrong, and casts considerable doubt on the entire process by which these “estimates” — the consensus of 16 intelligence bureaucracies — are conducted and accorded gospel status.
Our own “confidence” is not heightened by the fact that the NIE’s main authors include three former State Department officials with previous reputations as “hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials,” according to an intelligence source. 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 (IAEA).
For a flavor of their political outlook, former Bush Administration antiproliferation official John Bolton recalls in his recent memoir that then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage “described Brill’s efforts in Vienna, or lack thereof, as ‘bull — .’” Mr. Brill was “retired” from the State Department by Colin Powell before being rehired, over considerable internal and public protest, as head of the National Counter-Proliferation Center by then-National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.
No less odd is the NIE’s conclusion that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to “international pressure.” The only serious pressure we can recall from that year was the U.S. invasion of Iraq. At the time, an Iranian opposition group revealed the existence of a covert Iranian nuclear program to mill and enrich uranium and produce heavy water at sites previously unknown to U.S. intelligence. The Bush Administration’s response was to punt the issue to the Europeans, who in 2003 were just beginning years of fruitless diplomacy before the matter was turned over to the U.N. Security Council.
An alternate theory exists, of course. They could have been flat wrong in 2005 and corrected their intel in the last six months. With the push to improve human and signal intelligence since 2001, they may have successfully penetrated Iranian defenses and discovered more information about Iran, and adjusted their conclusions accordingly.
That, however, doesn’t change the fact that the intel community has consistently concluded until now that Iran had an active nuclear-weapons program, and refused to end it. That conclusion fits the facts somewhat better than the new one does. If Iran ended its nuclear program in 2003, why did they insist on refusing to verify it with their trading partners in the EU for the next several years? Why did the mullahs refuse to comply with UN Security Council resolutions and accept trade and diplomatic sanctions rather than allow verification at key sites? Just to prove a point when the US intel community suddenly reversed course, an event that no one predicted?
That makes no sense at all. The Iranians may have given up their weapons program in 2003, but if so, they did it then because of the exposure by the dissident group that year and the threat of American military force, as that was the sum total of “international pressure” in that year. The EU-3 began negotiations late that year with Teheran on this very subject, and that would have been the propitious time to allow verification. If Iran couldn’t find room for verification with Jacques Chirac’s France, Tony Blair’s Britain, and Gerhard Schroeder’s Germany in 2003, it wasn’t because they had stopped working towards a nuclear weapon.
At any rate, Iran still hasn’t offered complete verification of their nuclear intentions. If international pressure worked to supposedly shut down the nuclear program, then we need to continue it until Iran complies with UNSC resolutions and allows inspections of all suspected facilities for verification. As the Washington Post notes in an editorial, the latest high-confidence conclusion supports the Bush administration’s efforts to use diplomacy and economic pressure to force Iran into full disclosure of their supposed halt to their weapons program.
-- Ed Morrissey on December 5, 2007, http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/016211.php
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Yes,....that nets it out well!
1. Through good intelligence gathering, and "boots on the ground," sufficient information has been gathered to document that there is no current attempt to build a nuke.
2. Someone may have been captured, or defected, who was able to give credible information about the current state of Iran's nuclear program.
3. Recently there was an urgent request to reconfigure the stealth bombers to carry deep penetrating bunker busters. That, and the recent attack by Israel on the Syrian nuclear facility may have been a wake up call to certain Iranians.
I don’t think so....guess I should post the NY Sun Editorial....and introduce a new name...Vann Van Diepen...(new name to me anyway,,,,)
************************EXCERPT****************************
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.
It's a dangerous game that may boomerang, making a war with Iran more likely. Our diplomats, after all, hoped to seal this month a deal to pass a third Security Council resolution against Iran. Already on Monday the Chinese delegation at Turtle Bay has started making noises about dropping their tepid support for such a document. Call it the Van Diepen Demarche, since the Chinese camarilla can boast that even America's intelligence estimate concludes the mullahs shuttered their nuclear weapons program more than four years ago.
So much for diplomatic pressure in the run up before the mullahs have their bomb. And so the options for preventing the Islamic Republic from going nuclear get progressively more narrow. What it means is that when the historians look back on this period, they will see that by sabotaging our diplomacy, our intelligence analysts have clarified the choice before the free world appeasement or war.
Fingar testified against Bolton in the Senate hearings.
This gives an interesting analysis of Fingar written in Feb 07:
“I can dream on but even with the will to fire him, it would have been virtually impossible to do so. Why? Because for decades Fingar’s China analyses were very useful to US administrations that wanted to normalize relations with China and downplay intelligence suggesting that China posed any kind of security threat to the US. But about 15 years ago Mr Fingar’s intelligence analysis work at the US Department of State began to encompass all countries. I don’t believe it’s coincidental that during those years State developed a terminal case of Clientitis and was rendered as a blind as a bat.
http://pundita.blogspot.com/2007/02/thomas-fingar-and-scary-new-day-in-us.html
So the agenda is normalization. NK redux.
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