Go to consortiumblog.com to post comments

Order Now

Archives

Age of Obama
Barack Obama's presidency

Bush End Game
George W. Bush's presidency since 2007

Bush - Second Term
George W. Bush's presidency from 2005-06

Bush - First Term
George W. Bush's presidency, 2000-04

Who Is Bob Gates?
The secret world of Defense Secretary Gates

2004 Campaign
Bush Bests Kerry

Behind Colin Powell's Legend
Gauging Powell's reputation.

The 2000 Campaign
Recounting the controversial campaign.

Media Crisis
Is the national media a danger to democracy?

The Clinton Scandals
Behind President Clinton's impeachment.

Nazi Echo
Pinochet & Other Characters.

The Dark Side of Rev. Moon
Rev. Sun Myung Moon and American politics.

Contra Crack
Contra drug stories uncovered

Lost History
America's tainted historical record

The October Surprise "X-Files"
The 1980 election scandal exposed.

International
From free trade to the Kosovo crisis.

Other Investigative Stories

Editorials

Here we go again. A report issued by the new Director General of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano, injected new adrenalin into those arguing that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon.

The usual suspects are hyping — and distorting — thin-gruel language in the report to “prove” that Iran is hard at work on a nuclear weapon. The New York Times’ David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, for example, highlighted a sentence about “alleged activities related to nuclear explosives,” which Amano says he wants to discuss with Iran. 

Amano’s report said:

“Addressing these issues is important for clarifying the Agency’s concerns about these activities and those described above, which seem to have continued beyond 2004.”

Sanger and Broad play up the “beyond 2004” language as “contradicting the American intelligence assessment…that concluded that work on a bomb was suspended at the end of 2003.” Other media have picked that up and run with it, apparently without bothering to read the IAEA report itself.

The Times article is, at best, disingenuous in claiming:

“The report cited new evidence, much of it collected in recent weeks, that appeared to paint a picture of a concerted drive in Iran toward a weapons capability.”

As far as I can tell, the “new evidence” consists of the “same-old, same-old” allegations and inferences already reported in the open press — material that failed to convince the Director of Intelligence, Dennis Blair, to depart from previous assessments during his Congressional testimony on Feb. 2.

Rather, he adhered closely to the unanimous conclusions of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of November 2007.

So what’s new? The Director General of the IAEA, for one thing.

Yukiya Amano found huge shoes to fill when he took over from the widely respected Mohamed ElBaradei on Dec. 1. ElBaradei had the courage to call a spade a spade and, when necessary, a forgery a forgery — like the documents alleging that Iraq had sought yellowcake uranium in Niger.

ElBaradei took a perverse — if diplomatic — delight in giving the lie to spurious allegations and became persona non grata to the Bush/Cheney administration. So much so that, in an unsuccessful campaign to deny him a third four-year term as Director General, the administration called in many diplomatic chits in 2005, the same year ElBaradei won the Nobel Peace Prize.

In addition to a strong spine, ElBaradei had credentials that would simply not quit. His extensive diplomatic experience together with a PhD in international law from New York University, gave him a gravitas that enabled him to lead the IAEA effectively.

Gravitas Needed

Lacking gravitas, one bends more easily. It is a fair assumption that Amano will prove more malleable than his predecessor — and surely more naïve.

How he handles the controversy generated by last week’s report should show whether he means to follow ElBaradei’s example or the more customary “flexibility” exhibited by many U.N. bureaucrats.

Press reports over the past few days — as well as past experience — strongly suggest that the “new evidence” cited by the Times may have come from the usual suspects — agenda-laden sources, like Israeli intelligence.

On Saturday, the Jerusalem Post quoted the Israeli government as saying the IAEA report “establishes that the agency has a lot of trustworthy information about the past and present activities that testify to the military tendencies of the Iranian program.”

The newspaper cited the IAEA report as suggesting that “Teheran had either resumed such work [on a nuclear weapon] or had never stopped when U.S. intelligence said it did.”

Perhaps the Jerusalem Post should have stopped there. But, in a highly suggestive sentence, it went on to suggest that “intelligence supplied by the US, Israel, and other IAEA member states on Iran’s attempts to use the cover of a civilian nuclear program to move toward a weapons program was compelling.”

Compelling? Not so much. It beggars belief that Israel would withhold such “intelligence” from the U.S. Judging from the congressional testimony of National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair on Feb. 2, the U.S. intelligence community sees the evidence as neither new nor compelling.

The analysis and judgments of the November 2007 NIE were a product of the original ethos of CIA’s intelligence directorate where the premium was on speaking without fear or favor — speaking truth to power.

It was a breath of fresh air for those of us aware of the importance of that kind of integrity. Some of us who have worked in the CIA’s analytical division proudly bear the retaliatory scars from administration officials, pundits, and academics pushing agenda-shaped, alternative analyses.

The supreme indignity was former CIA Director George Tenet’s tenet that intelligence should be cooked to order — as was done in the September 2002 NIE regarding WMD in Iraq. That was, pure and simple, prostitution of our profession, and not very different from what John Yoo and his lawyer accomplices did to the legal profession in finding waterboarding and other acts of torture not torture.

An Honest Estimate

After a bottom-up investigation of all evidence on Iran’s nuclear activities and plans, the November 2007 Estimate boldly contradicted what President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their Israeli counterparts had been claiming about the imminence of a nuclear threat from Iran.

Happily, courage was not limited to Tom Fingar, then chair of the National Intelligence Council, and those working under his supervision on the Estimate. The most senior U.S. military officers took the unusual step of insisting that the essence of the Estimate’s key judgments be made public.

They calculated, correctly, that this would put a spike in the wheels of the juggernaut then rolling toward a fresh disaster -- war with Iran. Recall that Adm. William Fallon, who became CENTCOM commander in March 2007, leaked to the press that there would be no attack on Iran “on my watch.”

Fallon was fired in March 2008. While not as outspoken as Fallon, his senior military colleagues shared his disdain for the dangerously simplistic views of Bush and Cheney on the use of military power.

Among a handful of Key Judgments of the November 2007 NIE were these:

“-We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program;

“-We also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons….

“-We assess with moderate confidence Tehran has not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”

But that was more than two years ago, you say. What about now?

February 2010

Less than three weeks ago, in formal testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair almost wore out the subjunctive mood, in addressing Iran’s possible plans for a nuclear weapon. His paragraphs were replete with dependent clauses, virtually all of them beginning with “if.”

Blair repeated verbatim the 2007 judgment that Iran is “keeping the option open to develop nuclear weapons,” and repeated the intelligence community’s agnosticism on the $64 question: “We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.”

Addressing the uranium enrichment plant at Qom, Blair pointed out that its small size and location under a mountain “fit nicely with a strategy of keeping the option open to build a nuclear weapon at some future date, if Tehran ever decides to do that.”

Such “advancements lead us to affirm our judgment from the 2007 NIE that Iran is technically capable of producing enough HEU [highly enriched uranium] for a weapon in the next few years, if it chooses to do so.”

Notably absent from Blair’s testimony was the first “high confidence” judgment of the 2007 NIE that “in fall 2003 Iran halted its nuclear weapons program,” and the “moderate confidence” assessment that Iran had not restarted it.

That was the most controversial judgment in 2007. Blair did not disavow it; he just didn’t mention it — probably in an attempt to let that sleeping dog lie.

Less likely, Blair may have chosen to sequester for closed session any discussion of “recent evidence” bearing on that key judgment. It is likely that Blair was aware of the doubts that would be raised by Amano’s IAEA report just two weeks later.

Spreading Confusion

As if the considered judgment of the intelligence community has no weight, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, was quick to cite the IAEA report to charge that Iran is pursuing “a nuclear weapons program with the purpose of evasion.”

Presumably, she was merely repeating the talking points given to her boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a week ago on her way to the Middle East.

Speaking a week ago in Qatar, Secretary Clinton expressed her deep concern at “accumulating evidence” that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon — as though deterrence is a thing of the past. On the question of what kind of threat the “accumulating evidence” poses to the U.S., Clinton inadvertently spilled the beans.

The evidence is deeply concerning, she said, not because it “directly threatens the United States, but it directly threatens a lot of our friends” — read Israel.

Recall that Clinton is on record saying the she would “obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel with a nuclear weapon. It is de rigueur never to mention the 200-300 nuclear weapons already in Israel’s arsenal.

Greg Thielmann, Senior Fellow at the Arms Control Association, notes that it would be far better if the U.S. would stress that Iran's right to uranium enrichment, consistent with Non-Proliferation Treaty Article IV, is contingent on Iran's adherence to the treaty's Articles I, II, and III.

Thielmann notes that Iran has no inherent right to uranium enrichment while it is violating its Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA. Yet this point is being lost by the West's unqualified emphasis on the demand that uranium enrichment be suspended, and inconsistent U.S. statements about Iran's intention to develop nuclear weapons.

Consequently, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can posture that the West is just trying to keep Iran down and deny it the rights guaranteed under the NPT.

Deja Iraq All Over Again

On June 5, 2008, then-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Jay Rockefeller made some remarkable comments that got sparse attention in the Fawning Corporate Media in the United States. Announcing the findings of a bipartisan report of a multi-year study on misstatements on prewar intelligence on Iraq, Rockefeller said:

“In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”

For God’s sake, spare us such “intelligence” on Iran.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.  During a 27-year career as a CIA analyst, he prepared the President’s Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates.  In January 2003, he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment about this or other stories, you can use your normal e-mail address and password. Ignore the prompt for a Google account.) To comment to us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue reporting and publishing stories like the one you just read, click here.

Back to Home Page