Iran, Nuclear Weapons, and the NIE

The new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities doesn’t change my view of that we need to restrain Iran. The NIE confirms that as recently as the fall of 2003, Iran was covertly working to develop nuclear weapons. Perhaps they have since halted their covert nuclear weapons work, but meanwhile they continue to aggressively pursue a uranium enrichment capability, despite the fact that it makes no economic sense as a civilian program.

This program was begun secretly as part of their larger nuclear weapons program and could be converted to bomb-making in short order. The knowledge and equipment necessary to enrich uranium for civilian nuclear fuel is identical to that used to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb; making fissile material for an atomic weapon just takes a little longer. Iran developed this program covertly and illicitly (in violation of its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty safeguards obligations) and pursued it for years before the United States and others found out about it. Iran’s transgressions are numerous: it failed to declare its activities, hid key portions of its program, and acquired material and technology illicitly, among other things. Much of this continues to this day.

As recently as two weeks ago, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran is not fully cooperating with the agency. IAEA Inspectors continue to have limited access to Iranian nuclear sites and their knowledge of Iran’s nuclear activities is “diminishing.” Iran has rejected the further transparency measures the IAEA has requested. Tehran has also refused to bring into force the Additional Protocol—an agreement that would give IAEA greater access to Iranian facilities to determine whether illicit activities are occurring. If all secret work has ended and Iran’s enrichment program is really for peaceful purposes, why this continued secrecy? What is Iran hiding?

Let us be clear about who we are dealing with. Iran has long-wanted to be the powerbroker in the Persian Gulf. Other states in the region know this and fear this. Iranian President Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs who run Iran have pledged to “wipe Israel off the map.” We also cannot forget that Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world, and that their support for Hezbollah, Hamas, and other terrorist groups, is all about achieving these ends. Iran has been modernizing its military for years, acquiring ballistic missile technology from around the world, and pursuing its nuclear program to facilitate its growing dominance and power. Would a country that is one of the world’s largest producers of oil and natural gas really spend billions of dollars just to acquire civilian nuclear power plants for electricity generation?

As a former member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, I can tell you that the intelligence business is extremely difficult. Complicating this challenge is our long-standing inability to secure credible intelligence about Iran, North Korea and other “hard targets”. The international community had inspectors in Iraq for years prior to 2003, and U.S. intelligence still got it wrong. ln 2005, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman Commission report underscored that “across the board, the Intelligence Community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world’s most dangerous actors.” My experience as the recent Chairman of the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board confirmed this assessment.

Let’s also remember that NIEs are snapshots. As recently as 2005 the intelligence community said that “Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons…..despite its international obligations and international pressure.” The new NIE says Iran “halted” its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003 in response to “increasing international scrutiny and pressure.” Both are “high confidence” conclusions; however, both can’t be right.

Even if the current estimate is accurate, too many people are too focused now on the assessment that Iran has “halted” its nuclear program. This is good news if indeed it has, but “halted” is much different than “abandoned.” We were told by the Clinton Administration in 1994 that the North Koreans had halted their nuclear program, and look what happened there. And other questions should concern us as well: is this an Iranian “disinformation” program; has their military program has gone too “deep” for us to detect it; or maybe they “halted” their program simply because they lacked the key ingredient—enriched uranium—that their increasingly successful civilian program is now producing.

All that said, if Iran’s program was indeed halted due to international pressure and scrutiny, now is the time to ramp up the pressure on Iran to abandon its fuel-cycle activities. After all, Iran today has 3,000 centrifuges operational, and continues to accelerate this effort despite two rounds of U.N. sanctions. At this pace, many experts estimate Tehran can produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon in a short while. Coupled with reports that Iran acquired a nuclear weapons design from the AQ Khan network, we have much to be concerned about with Iran’s “peaceful civilian” program. Yet in the wake of the NIE’s release, international resolve is likely to weaken (led by China and Russia) giving Iran’s Revolutionary Guard the perfect opportunity to re-start their weapons program.

Everyone should recognize that an Iran armed with nuclear weapons is a threat to peace, security and stability, both for our friends and allies in the region, and for us. And so is an Iran that possesses the ability to build nuclear weapons on demand. There is a lot of consternation these days over the possibility of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Islamic extremists. Can anyone feel safe with a nuclear-armed Tehran, or even one that can quickly develop the “nuclear option”? We should not be surprised that Israel is challenging this NIE.

The Iranians are hoping we will be foolish enough to forget about their history of deception and the military origin of their ongoing enrichment work. They want us instead to give them the benefit of the doubt from here on out. It would be foolhardy to permit Iran to acquire the capability to enrich uranium on any scale.

Our challenge is to not overreact to any intelligence report, whether it is good or bad. Intelligence is a difficult business at best, and our intelligence community still has a lot of improving to do. Still, the best the NIE tells us that the Iranians made a tactical decision to suspend their program, but we still don’t know if they made a strategic one to abandon it. We need to ascertain Tehran’s ambitions and intentions—that is the key. In the meantime, If we believe that international pressure and scrutiny have been effective, then now is the time to increase it. We must convince the Iranians to abandon their fuel cycle/uranium enrichment efforts, since fissile material appears to be the only ingredient the regime lacks to make a bomb.

The bottom line is that the U.S. must lead. And American leadership requires a Commander in Chief who understands intelligence, foreign policy, and national security, and has experience in all of these areas. The President must reassure our friends and allies in the region, and around the world, that the U.S. will not act precipitously, and at the same time, we will not back away from ensuring Iran lives up to its international commitments and meets international demands in order to preserve peace and stability. At the end of the day, we must hope and work for the best, but plan and ready ourselves for the worst.

Just to collect them all in a safe thread where I know people who actually care will take note, some posts from various sources on this fishy NIE

Former Iranian President Khatami laughs his ass of because his religion of peace provides for Taqqiyah (lying to infidels is okie dokie, smokie).
It appears that Ahmadinejad’s predecessor, lied through his teeth and made nice with everyone on the promise that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapons program. The EU even tripled trade with Iran in 1997 based on this promise.
NRO article by Michael Rubin is here, highlights of that article are below:
The NIE time line clearly describes the elaborate deception that occurred during the term of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, when Iran tried to build a nuclear bomb. It proves Iran was cheating even as well-meaning American diplomats believed promises that it was cooperating with the international community.
On Aug. 4, 1997, Khatami declared, “We are in favor of a dialogue between civilizations and a detente in our relations with the outside world.” European diplomats, American academics and even Secretary of State Madeleine Albright applauded him. European statesmen opened palaces to him, and the Iranian president became the toast of Rome, Paris and London.
In fact, to encourage Khatami’s promises of reform, the European Union nearly tripled its trade with Iran - and the Islamic Republic reaped a windfall. But rather than integrate itself into the family of nations, Khatami and the theocratic leadership he served invested the money in a covert quest for the bomb.
The NIE proves once and for all that all of Khatami’s talk of dialogue and reform was little more than a smoke screen.
http://patdollard.com/2007/12/05/nie-proves-ahmadinejads-predecessor-deliberately-deceived-the-world-about-nukes/
Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with the new IRGC chief, Gen. Mohammed Ali Jafari. Hey! Guess what? Jafari is also the head dude of the Lover’s of Martyrdom Brigades.
In addition, the report was supervised and written by known haters of George Bush with long histories of opposition to WMD sanctions. The NIE is chaired by a man who spent much of last year doing everything he could to derail John Bolton’s confirmation as U.N. Ambassador. It appears ever more that this is not a genuine report, but a political document, not unlike Dan Rather’s supposed Bush National Guard memo, designed strictly to aid the Democrat Party in the next election. It is time to move past the headlines and into real investigation of just what kind of games are going on here.
By Kenneth R. Timmerman for NewsMax.com:
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.
Christian Westermann, another favorite of Senate Democrats in the Bolton confirmation hearings, was among the career State Department analysts tapped by Fingar and Brill.
As a State Department intelligence analyst, Westermann had missed the signs of biological weapons development in Cuba, and played into the hands of Castro apologist Sen. Christopher Dodd, D, Conn., by continuing to use impeached intelligence reports on Cuba that had been written by self-avowed Cuban spy, Ana Belen Montes.
“After failing to recognize the signs of biological weapons development in Cuba and Cuba’s cooperation with Iran, Westermann was promoted to become national intelligence officer for biological weapons,” I wrote.
“Let’s hope a walk-in defector from Iranian intelligence doesn’t tell us that Iran has given biological weapons to terrorists to attack new York or Chicago,” I added, “because Westermann will certainly object that the source of that information was not reliable — at least, until Americans start dying.”
It now appears that this is very similar to what happened while the intelligence community was preparing the Iran NIE.
My former colleague from the Washington Times, Bill Gertz, suggests in today’s print edition of the paper that Revolutionary Guards Gen. Alireza Asgari, who defected while in Turkey in February, was the human source whose information led to the NIE”s conclusion that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
But intelligence sources in Europe told Newsmax in late September that Asgari’s debriefings on Iran’s nuclear weapons programs were “so dramatic” that they caused French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his foreign minister to speak out publicly about the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.
Sarkozy stunned his countrymen when he told an annual conference of French ambassadors on Aug. 27, 2007, that Iran faced a stark choice between shutting down its nuclear program, or tougher international sanctions and ultimately, war.
“This approach is the only one that allows us to escape from a catastrophic alternative: an Iranian bomb, or the bombing of Iran,” Sarkozy said.
Three weeks later, Foreign Minister Bernard Koucher warned in a televised interview that the world’s major powers needed to toughen sanctions on Iran to prevent Tehran from getting the bomb and to prevent war. “We must prepare for the worst,” Kouchner said. “The worst, sir, is war.”
Those comments were prompted by reports that were given to the French president about Iran’s nuclear weapons program derived from debriefings of the defector, Gen. Ashgari, a Newsmax intelligence source in Europe said.
Ashgari is the highest-level Iranian official to have defected to the West since the Islamic revolution of 1979. His defection set off a panic in Tehran.
As a senior member of the general staff of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, Asgari had access to highly-classified intelligence information, as well as strategic planning documents, as I reported at the time.
A damage assessment then underway in Tehran was expected to “take months” to complete, so extensive was Asgari’s access to Iran’s nuclear and intelligence secrets.
Asgari had detailed knowledge of Iranian Revolutionary Guards units operating in Iraq and Lebanon because he had trained some of them. He also knew some of the secrets of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, because he had been a top procurement officer and a deputy minister of defense in charge of logistics. But Asgari never had responsibility for nuclear weapons development, and probably did not have access to information about the status of the secret programs being run by the Revolutionary Guards, Iranian sources tell Newsmax.
In an effort to cover up the failure of Iranian counter-intelligence to prevent Asgari’s defection, a Persian language Web site run by the former Revolutioanry Guards Comdr. Gen. Mohsen Rezai claimed in March that Asgari was on a CIA “hit list” of 20 former Revolutionary Guards officers and had been assassinated.
The Senate intelligence committee will be briefed today on the NIE, and the House committee on Wednesday.
But already, the declassified summary has Republicans grumbling on Capitol Hill.
“We want to know why we should believe this,” one congressional Republican told Newsmax. “This is such a departure from the past and there are so many unanswered questions.”
While the intelligence community is supposed to report just the facts and its assessment of those facts and their reliability to policy-makers, this NIE clear advocates policy positions.
“Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue that we judged previously,” the NIC wrote in the declassified “Key Judgments” of the NIE.
The NIE opined that the new assessment leads to the policy conclusion that the United States should offer “some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunites,” in order to lock in Iranian good behavior.
This carrot and stick approach has been the State Department’s preferred policy for the past 27 years, and has only strengthened the resolve of Iran’s leaders to continue defying the United States. “Those [countries that] assume that decaying methods such as psychological war, political propaganda and the so-called economic sanctions would work and prevent Iran’s fast drive toward progress are mistaken,” Ahmadinejad said in Tehran in September at a military parade.
By “progress” Ahmadinejad was referring to Iran’s recently-declared success at enriching uranium.
Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees “have been running around with big smiles on their faces,” a Republican source tells Newsmax.
Republicans on the committees intend to ask for more information on the sourcing of this latest NIE during closed door briefings today and tomorrow.
http://patdollard.com/2007/12/05/us-intel-possibly-duped-by-iran/
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.
http://patdollard.com/2007/12/05/is-suspect-intel-the-source-for-the-nie-report/
1. “Happily, the severity of specific threats to our nation, our values, our system of government, and our way of life
Thomas Fingar, while Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence And Research, speaking before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing onFormer Iranian President Khatami laughs his ass of because his religion of peace provides for Taqqiyah (lying to infidels is okie dokie, smokie).
It appears that Ahmadinejad’s predecessor, lied through his teeth and made nice with everyone on the promise that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapons program. The EU even tripled trade with Iran in 1997 based on this promise.
NRO article by Michael Rubin is here, highlights of that article are below:
The NIE time line clearly describes the elaborate deception that occurred during the term of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, when Iran tried to build a nuclear bomb. It proves Iran was cheating even as well-meaning American diplomats believed promises that it was cooperating with the international community.
On Aug. 4, 1997, Khatami declared, “We are in favor of a dialogue between civilizations and a detente in our relations with the outside world.” European diplomats, American academics and even Secretary of State Madeleine Albright applauded him. European statesmen opened palaces to him, and the Iranian president became the toast of Rome, Paris and London.
In fact, to encourage Khatami’s promises of reform, the European Union nearly tripled its trade with Iran - and the Islamic Republic reaped a windfall. But rather than integrate itself into the family of nations, Khatami and the theocratic leadership he served invested the money in a covert quest for the bomb.
The NIE proves once and for all that all of Khatami’s talk of dialogue and reform was little more than a smoke screen.
http://patdollard.com/2007/12/05/nie-proves-ahmadinejads-predecessor-deliberately-deceived-the-world-about-nukes/
Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with the new IRGC chief, Gen. Mohammed Ali Jafari. Hey! Guess what? Jafari is also the head dude of the Lover’s of Martyrdom Brigades.
In addition, the report was supervised and written by known haters of George Bush with long histories of opposition to WMD sanctions. The NIE is chaired by a man who spent much of last year doing everything he could to derail John Bolton’s confirmation as U.N. Ambassador. It appears ever more that this is not a genuine report, but a political document, not unlike Dan Rather’s supposed Bush National Guard memo, designed strictly to aid the Democrat Party in the next election. It is time to move past the headlines and into real investigation of just what kind of games are going on here.
By Kenneth R. Timmerman for NewsMax.com:
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.
Christian Westermann, another favorite of Senate Democrats in the Bolton confirmation hearings, was among the career State Department analysts tapped by Fingar and Brill.
As a State Department intelligence analyst, Westermann had missed the signs of biological weapons development in Cuba, and played into the hands of Castro apologist Sen. Christopher Dodd, D, Conn., by continuing to use impeached intelligence reports on Cuba that had been written by self-avowed Cuban spy, Ana Belen Montes.
“After failing to recognize the signs of biological weapons development in Cuba and Cuba’s cooperation with Iran, Westermann was promoted to become national intelligence officer for biological weapons,” I wrote.
“Let’s hope a walk-in defector from Iranian intelligence doesn’t tell us that Iran has given biological weapons to terrorists to attack new York or Chicago,” I added, “because Westermann will certainly object that the source of that information was not reliable — at least, until Americans start dying.”
It now appears that this is very similar to what happened while the intelligence community was preparing the Iran NIE.
My former colleague from the Washington Times, Bill Gertz, suggests in today’s print edition of the paper that Revolutionary Guards Gen. Alireza Asgari, who defected while in Turkey in February, was the human source whose information led to the NIE”s conclusion that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
But intelligence sources in Europe told Newsmax in late September that Asgari’s debriefings on Iran’s nuclear weapons programs were “so dramatic” that they caused French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his foreign minister to speak out publicly about the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.
Sarkozy stunned his countrymen when he told an annual conference of French ambassadors on Aug. 27, 2007, that Iran faced a stark choice between shutting down its nuclear program, or tougher international sanctions and ultimately, war.
“This approach is the only one that allows us to escape from a catastrophic alternative: an Iranian bomb, or the bombing of Iran,” Sarkozy said.
Three weeks later, Foreign Minister Bernard Koucher warned in a televised interview that the world’s major powers needed to toughen sanctions on Iran to prevent Tehran from getting the bomb and to prevent war. “We must prepare for the worst,” Kouchner said. “The worst, sir, is war.”
Those comments were prompted by reports that were given to the French president about Iran’s nuclear weapons program derived from debriefings of the defector, Gen. Ashgari, a Newsmax intelligence source in Europe said.
Ashgari is the highest-level Iranian official to have defected to the West since the Islamic revolution of 1979. His defection set off a panic in Tehran.
As a senior member of the general staff of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, Asgari had access to highly-classified intelligence information, as well as strategic planning documents, as I reported at the time.
A damage assessment then underway in Tehran was expected to “take months” to complete, so extensive was Asgari’s access to Iran’s nuclear and intelligence secrets.
Asgari had detailed knowledge of Iranian Revolutionary Guards units operating in Iraq and Lebanon because he had trained some of them. He also knew some of the secrets of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, because he had been a top procurement officer and a deputy minister of defense in charge of logistics. But Asgari never had responsibility for nuclear weapons development, and probably did not have access to information about the status of the secret programs being run by the Revolutionary Guards, Iranian sources tell Newsmax.
In an effort to cover up the failure of Iranian counter-intelligence to prevent Asgari’s defection, a Persian language Web site run by the former Revolutioanry Guards Comdr. Gen. Mohsen Rezai claimed in March that Asgari was on a CIA “hit list” of 20 former Revolutionary Guards officers and had been assassinated.
The Senate intelligence committee will be briefed today on the NIE, and the House committee on Wednesday.
But already, the declassified summary has Republicans grumbling on Capitol Hill.
“We want to know why we should believe this,” one congressional Republican told Newsmax. “This is such a departure from the past and there are so many unanswered questions.”
While the intelligence community is supposed to report just the facts and its assessment of those facts and their reliability to policy-makers, this NIE clear advocates policy positions.
“Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue that we judged previously,” the NIC wrote in the declassified “Key Judgments” of the NIE.
The NIE opined that the new assessment leads to the policy conclusion that the United States should offer “some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunites,” in order to lock in Iranian good behavior.
This carrot and stick approach has been the State Department’s preferred policy for the past 27 years, and has only strengthened the resolve of Iran’s leaders to continue defying the United States. “Those [countries that] assume that decaying methods such as psychological war, political propaganda and the so-called economic sanctions would work and prevent Iran’s fast drive toward progress are mistaken,” Ahmadinejad said in Tehran in September at a military parade.
By “progress” Ahmadinejad was referring to Iran’s recently-declared success at enriching uranium.
Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees “have been running around with big smiles on their faces,” a Republican source tells Newsmax.
Republicans on the committees intend to ask for more information on the sourcing of this latest NIE during closed door briefings today and tomorrow.
http://patdollard.com/2007/12/05/us-intel-possibly-duped-by-iran/
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.
http://patdollard.com/2007/12/05/is-suspect-intel-the-source-for-the-nie-report/
1. “Happily, the severity of specific threats to our nation, our values, our system of government, and our way of life
Thomas Fingar, while Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence And Research, speaking before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on current and projected national security threats to U.S., February 2001
http://pundita.blogspot.com/2007/12/yikes-thomas-fingar-one-of-three-main.html
current and projected national security threats to U.S., February 2001
http://pundita.blogspot.com/2007/12/yikes-thomas-fingar-one-of-three-main.html

The Key Question about the NIE’s Key Judgment
American Thinker ^ | December 05, 2007 | Herbert E. Meyer
Posted on 12/05/2007 4:05:59 PM PST by Ooh-Ah
In the Intelligence business, you get paid for just one thing: to be right.
So here’s the key question about the Key Judgment of the National Intelligence Council’s new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear intentions and capabilities: Is this judgment supported by the evidence?
The judgment that’s stirring up all the controversy — and it’s a real shocker — comes in the very first sentence: We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program. The judgment is astonishing for two reasons. First, it flies in the face of virtually everything we know - or thought we knew — about the Iranian regime, its capabilities and its intentions. Second, If the new Key Judgment is correct it means that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program fully two years before publication of the National Intelligence Council’s 2005 Estimate on this same subject, which concluded “with high confidence” that Iran “currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons.”
Let’s hope that the new Key Judgment is correct, because it would be very good news for world peace — although it would raise the troubling question of how our Intelligence Community could have been so wrong back in 2005. But if the new Key Judgment is incorrect — in other words, if Iran in fact is now building nuclear weapons — the political impact of its publication will be catastrophic. That’s because it will make it virtually impossible for President Bush to stop the Iranians by launching a military attack on their nuclear facilities or by working covertly to overthrow the regime itself. And, of course, it would raise even more troubling questions about the capabilities of our Intelligence Community.
Skepticism is Warranted
Simply put, we need to know for sure whether the new Key Judgment is right or wrong. And, given the long list of failures and reversals that has plagued our Intelligence Community during the last decade, it’s reasonable to be skeptical.
To understand what to do next, keep in mind that all NIEs consist of two parts: the “Key Judgments” and the text itself. It’s the text that includes, or should include, the evidence that our intelligence agencies have gathered relevant to the issue at hand. Obviously, you complete the text before writing the Key Judgments, which emerge from the text itself. And because the Key Judgments are just that - judgments - it sometimes happens that the leaders of our various intelligence agencies will agree on the evidence but disagree about the meaning of the evidence. That’s why there are often dissenting opinions within the Key Judgments.
What was released on Monday is only the Key Judgments. The text itself hasn’t been released — and won’t be, because the text presumably contains highly classified data relating to what we’ve learned about Iran’s nuclear programs from all sources including, of course, our spies and satellites.
But the text is available to leading members of Congress, including members of both the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees. Today — right now, this instant — every one of these individuals should get hold of a copy of the NIE and read it. More precisely, they should cancel whatever appointments and public events are on their calendars, turn off their cell phones, then sit quietly with a pen in hand and work their way, slowly and carefully, through the text of the NIE. And when they’ve done that, each Representative or Senator should step forward to report - without giving details - whether the Key Judgment about Iran’s nuclear weapons program is, or isn’t, supported by the evidence.
Has Congress got the Brains?
Alas, given today’s partisan political atmosphere — and, even more distressing, the limited intellectual abilities of the people we elect — this may not be sufficient to provide the confidence we need. If ever there was a time for a fast-track Presidential commission - this is it. Why not ask a half-dozen or so of the sharpest minds in our country to read through this NIE and to tell us - again, without providing details — whether the Key Judgment is supported by evidence within the NIE’s text. Not all members of this commission need be intelligence experts - or Iran experts, for that matter. In fact, it would be better if most aren’t. The two qualities required are intellectual firepower and credibility. We ought to be able to find six such souls among the nearly 300 million of us. And the whole thing shouldn’t take more than a week’s time, if that.
It is no exaggeration to say that Iran holds the key to whether or not the world is facing a nuclear war. Surely, it’s worth an extra effort to be confident that this time, our Intelligence Community has got it right.

Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. In these positions, he managed production of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimates. He is author of How to Analyze Information.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1935337/posts

Banned cargo on way to Iran held in UAE

Posted by chemical_boy
On 12/05/2007 3:15:40 PM PST • 7 replies

Finacial Times ^ | December 5 2007 | Simeon Kerr in Dubai and Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Tehran
The United Arab Emirates has impounded the cargo of a vessel bound for Iran after discovering that “hazardous materials” aboard contravened UN sanctions placed on the Islamic republic to curtail its nuclear development programme. In a further ratcheting up of the UAE’s determination to curb misuse of its ports, an official there confirmed that the cargo, detained for testing last month, contained materials banned by UN Security Council resolutions 1737 and 1747, while the purchaser of the materials had also been barred by the same resolutions. But he declined to identify the contents of the cargo or the Iranian company...
December 05, 2007
Curveball: Defected Iranian General Source For NIE Claim of Nuke Freeze?
—Ace
Yeah, Curveball baby. Because this guy wasn’t any more in on the loop than was the Iraqi source called Curveball.
More: While everyone spins this as a claim that Iran is denuclearized, the report says that there is “high confidence” the program was suspended for a period and merely “moderate confidence” it is still suspended.”
In other words: They don’t fucking know.
Thanks to CJ.
What’s This? This USAToday article may offer the best explanation:
For all of the effort spent trying to determine the scope of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, it was a media visit to Iran that helped the intelligence community reconsider its assessment of the program, U.S. intelligence officials said Monday.
Photographs taken during the media visit this year weren’t decisive in determining when Iran stopped its nuclear program, said an officer who helped prepare a National Intelligence Estimate released Monday.
But the photos from Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility were reviewed by intelligence analysts who concluded Iran continues to face “significant technical problems” in using the facility to enrich uranium, the officer said.
...

In revising their estimate, intelligence officers said they were mindful of “lessons learned” from a 2002 report that overstated the case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
“We had to show our homework,” one said, by justifying the new judgments to intelligence agency leaders who OK’d the final version.
...
The intelligence officials also cited Libya’s decision in 2003 to stop its nuclear program and the arrest of Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan as reasons Iran stopped trying to develop weapons.
The estimate, the collective judgment of the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies, said Iran had not restarted its weapons program as of mid-2007 but could resume weapons development.
The intelligence community concluded in 2005 that Iran was “determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure.”
Technical limitations, both estimates concluded, make it hard for Iran to produce weapons-grade uranium before the early years of the next decade, at a minimum.
Why Was It Leaked? A lot of people are speculating that Bush ordered it leaked, as some sort of diplomatic truffle for Iran.

Posted by Ace at 07:15 PM | Post Only | New Comments Thingy

December 05, 2007
NIE Report On Iran Nuke Freeze Called Bullshit By... Hans Friggin’ Blix
As they say, if you’ve lost Walter Cronkite, you’ve lost the nation. And Hans Blix is the Walter Cronkite of WMD apologism and soft-pedaling.
Blix said the U.S. agencies likely acted because they heard «all the rhetoric of World War III _ and either we have the Iranian bomb or we have the bombing of Iran.
...
.
«The intelligence services got a lot of blame for the invasion of Iraq that they had exaggerated what they saw ,» Blix said. «This time they do not want to carry the responsibility.
Apparently we’re to believe the Iranians have 3000 centrifuges furiously spinning out weapons-grade uranium just so they can, um, make some really kickass (but lethally carcinogenic) glow-in-the-dark watches.
Thanks to CJ.

posted by Ace at 04:38 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/248486.php

December 05, 2007
*Bush* Lied? Architecht of NIE Nonsense Testified *Five Months Ago* That Iran Was Pursuing The Bomb
The new meme from the MSM is that Bush has been lying about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, as he knew all about this NIE report long ago (and, presumably, believed this load of crap to be true).
This narrative, so convenient to the political agenda of the liberal MSM, is, alas, not true, though I’m not sure that matters anymore.
July 11, 2007: Thomas Fingar, one of the main authors of the NIE l.i.e., delivers this testimony to Congress:
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.
Two points: This reversal by the “intelligence” (giggle) community was quite recent and Bush cannot be charged with “lying” for not precognitively glimpsing the future of their sudden changes in heart.
More importantly: This means the entire NIE is based on quite recent “intelligence” which I have to doubt has been vetted all that well.
Sketchy evidence. Recently obtained. Quickly vetted. And that leads to this overstated nonsense of “high confidence” of an Iranian nuclear freeze.
Who’s the task manager for the NIE — Franklin Foer?
Check out Hot Air for video of John Bolton ripping this piece of shit to shreds. Also be sure to check out the sort of glaring error that typically finds its way into what is supposed to be the best and most accurate product of the “intelligence” (titter) community.
Clarification: My source requests I omit a part of this post. I’ll do so.
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/248488.php

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1934878/posts

http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2007/12/nie_an_abrupt_aboutface.asp

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