parsing Bolton »
« the “smirk”…
[neo]con man…

Posted on Thursday 6 December 2007


American intelligence agencies reversed their view about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program after they obtained notes last summer from the deliberations of Iranian military officials involved in the weapons development program, senior intelligence and government officials said on Wednesday. The notes included conversations and deliberations in which some of the military officials complained bitterly about what they termed a decision by their superiors in late 2003 to shut down a complex engineering effort to design nuclear weapons, including a warhead that could fit atop Iranian missiles.

The newly obtained notes contradicted public assertions by American intelligence officials that the nuclear weapons design effort was still active. But according to the intelligence and government officials, they give no hint of why Iran’s leadership decided to halt the covert effort. Ultimately, the notes and deliberations were corroborated by other intelligence, the officials said, including intercepted conversations among Iranian officials, collected in recent months. It is not clear if those conversations involved the same officers and others whose deliberations were recounted in the notes, or if they included their superiors.

The American officials who described the highly classified operation, which led to one of the biggest reversals in the history of American nuclear intelligence, declined to describe how the notes were obtained. But they said that the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies had organized a “red team” to determine if the new information might have been part of an elaborate disinformation campaign mounted by Iran to derail the effort to impose sanctions against it.

In the end, American intelligence officials rejected that theory, though they were challenged to defend that conclusion in a meeting two weeks ago in the White House situation room, in which the notes and deliberations were described to the most senior members of President Bush’s national security team, including Vice President Dick Cheney. “It was a pretty vivid exchange,” said one participant in the conversation…
Sounds like pretty good Intelligence to me. We aren’t told much about the "Red Team," but that’s their job. We can only hope they’ve done it well. That’s what they’re for. But consider John Bolton’s response in tomorrow’s Washington Post.
By John R. Bolton

Rarely has a document from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the "intelligence community" on issues such as Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly.

All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than "intelligence" analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it. President Bush may not be able to repair his Iran policy (which was not rigorous enough to begin with) in his last year, but he would leave a lasting legacy by returning the intelligence world to its proper function.

Consider these flaws in the NIE’s "key judgments," which were made public even though approximately 140 pages of analysis, and reams of underlying intelligence, remain classified.

First, the headline finding – that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 – is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. blah, blah, blah…

The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs’ motives and objectives. blah, blah, blah…

Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. blah, blah, blah…

Third, the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. blah, blah, blah…

Fourth, the NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data. blah, blah, blah…

Fifth, many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department, brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national intelligence. These officials had relatively benign views of Iran’s nuclear intentions five and six years ago; now they are writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high. In fact, these are precisely the policy biases they had before, recycled as "intelligence judgments."

That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling. While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this "intelligence" torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were. Ironically, the NIE opens the way for Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.
I will admit my bias up front. There are three men who I consider the most dangerous of all [for different reasons]. Newt Gingrich – a Machiavellian figure, Dick Cheney – a dangerously paranoid and arrogant man, and John Bolton – I’ll get to him. The argument he makes in this op-ed takes us back to where all of this Neoconservative lunacy began in the halls of the American Enterprise Institute during the mid to late 1990’s. They were all there – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bolton, Perle, Wlfowitz, Libby, Gingrich, etc. There was a heavy loading from the Zionists, adding fuel to the fire. They were sitting out the Clinton years with little to do but dream of the Reagan years wisfully. There were others – Michael Ledeen and Laurie Mylroie – dangerous people with dangerous ideas. They collectively decided that there were two main enemies in Government – the State Department and the C.I.A. The latter was their particular focus. Clinton, informed by the C.I.A., was directing his attention towards the Middle East Terrorists – al Qaeda, specifically. The Neoconservatives thought that he was being lead astray by the C.I.A. They argued that the real baddies were State Governments – Iraq, Syria, Iran. In 1997, they formed the Project for the New American Century down the hall from A.E.I. They wrote Clinton, urging him to ignore the C.I.A. and go after Saddam Hussein. They revived Wlfowitz’s Defense Guidance which later morphed into The Bush Doctrine.

When Bush got elected, they imported this whole show into our government as our government. The rest is history – war with Iraq. When Bush went to war, Laurie Mylroie wrote a book about the "liberal" State Department and C.I.A. trying to undermine him. I still have it [It’s so crazy that she’s kind of dropped off the front line].

Bolton was part of that early show, only he added the U.N. to the mix with the C.I.A. and the State Department. These people have fought with the C.I.A. for seven long years – discounting everything they say. Now reread what Bolton says. It’s the same A.E.I. Neoconservative garbage they were talking about in the late 1990’s. It’s the same insane rhetoric that we heard from one of their worst yet – Douglas Feith – traitor extraordinaire. They’ve been saying this for now years, "Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than ‘intelligence’ analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it." And here’s a really fine example, "many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department, brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national intelligence. These officials had relatively benign views of Iran’s nuclear intentions five and six years ago; now they are writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high. In fact, these are precisely the policy biases they had before, recycled as ‘intelligence judgments’." Year after year, spouting the same disdainful, contemptuous judgements without noticing that ignoring our Intelligence and deploring using diplomacy has gotten us into one really horrible mess after another. The Neoconservative group-think is the biggest single policy failure in our national history, yet John Bolton is still saying it like it’s some kind of fresh analysis. He’s like some Nazi standing up at Nurenberg arguing that Hitler was good for Germany.

That first story sounds like Intelligence to me – not policy. It’s not like their bogus Niger Uranium story, or the Aluminum tubes, or Feith’s fabricated al Qaeda ties with Hussein. Neoconservatives believe only the things that support their own story, very flimsy things. They debunk everything else. Where was Dick Cheney’s "vivid exchange" when the Niger forgeries were being passed off as Intelligence? Where was John Bolton when the C.I.A. was warning people about al Qaeda before 911? They were dead wrong, yet they’re still at it. And John Bolton, a man with no Intelligence or Military experience of his own is pronouncing the N.I.E. a "flawed product!" Talk about bringing a bias into policy decisions, Mr. Bolton is writing that book as we speak…

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.