Doin' A Lil Catching Up

Further on that NIE… John Negroponte, the former Director of National Intelligence, was on The News Hour last evening. The first and major topic he and Jim Lehrer discussed was the Iran NIE. An excerpt:

JIM LEHRER: What is your reading of why it took four years to determine, the U.S. intelligence to determine that the uranium program had been halted?

JOHN NEGROPONTE: My reading is that it's new information. There certainly wasn't anything at the time that we issued that assessment in the spring of 2005 that would suggest that they had halted their work on a -- the design or the construction of a nuclear weapon, nor did I see anything during my close to two years' tenure there that would have altered that judgment.

In fact, I left my position as director of national intelligence convinced that Iraq -- that Iran, excuse me, was determined to acquire a nuclear weapon.

JIM LEHRER: How does that work? How could suddenly, two years later, people look at something and see something entirely different?

JOHN NEGROPONTE: Well, it isn't only a question of looking. It's a question -- and this would have to get you into sources and methods -- but it would be new information acquired from a variety of sources that was heretofore unavailable.

This is not unusual in the world of intelligence. You acquire insights into situations well after the fact based on some new information, some new source, some new stream of information that comes to your attention that had not been previously available. So I don't find this particularly surprising.

[…]

JIM LEHRER: Would you be sympathetic to those who are skeptical about this whole thing? "Wait a minute. U.S. intelligence had Iraq wrong on weapons of mass destruction. In 2005, U.S. intelligence had Iran wrong on nuclear weapons. Now there's a new one in 2007." About whether to believe, not believe, how do you test these things, just an ordinary person?

JOHN NEGROPONTE: I think that, first of all, I think that our intelligence community is second to none in this world. I have the highest regard for the men and women of our intelligence community, for the collectors, for the analysts. I think they do absolutely superlative work. That would be my first point.

Secondly, I think I would make the point that intelligence is only one aspect of formulating a policy. It's an element, a tool, if you will, in formulating our policy. And it is not the policy itself.

So I think this is new information. We have to factor it into our calculations, and we have to carry it forward. But I don't think it alters the fact that Iran had previously concealed its enrichment activities, only made them public once they had been revealed by sources inside of Iran who are opposed to the regime.

And there is a lot to be explained, in terms of what Iran was doing in the nuclear area. And it is not enough simply to have this one bit of information that they suspended work on a weapons design back in 2003. There are many, many other elements of this activity that need to be explained.

Negroponte’s explanation for the latest NIE conclusions sounds plausible. New information, new sources, and more resources (read that: intelligence analysts, operatives, and other personnel) could conceivably result in new findings. John Bolton disagrees, vehemently:

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. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran's nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between "military" and "civilian" programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran's "civilian" program that posed the main risk of a nuclear "breakout."

The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs' motives and objectives. The current NIE freely admits to having only moderate confidence that the suspension continues and says that there are significant gaps in our intelligence and that our analysts dissent from their initial judgment on suspension. This alone should give us considerable pause.

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. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point.

Captain Ed notes that The Veep is more sanguine and accepting of the NIE than Bolton, and makes the argument that Mr. Cheney is still in the loop, whereas Mr. Bolton is not. Still and even, other voices…some predictable, some not… agree with Mr. Bolton.

Meanwhile, the centrifuges keep spinning in Natanz and spin of a different sort continues in Tehran’s halls of power.

This is progress?

I did a lil experiment yesterday. Shortly after putting up yesterday’s post (which took considerable research, believe it or don’t, even if it was only hockey) I switched off the computer and left it off…all day. The object of said experiment being to see if I could live without the ‘net, however briefly. Well, the short answer is “yes, I can live without it.” The long answer is somewhat more involved because it deals with issues such as withdrawal and associated mental anguish, addiction/habituation, and the nature of a solitary life-in-retirement (by choice, mind you, Gentle Reader)…so let’s not go there. Boring.

More to the point: yeah, it can be done, but why do it at all? Assuming, of course, that all of the other things in life don’t suffer. Does El Casa Móvil still get cleaned? Is the larder stocked? Is dinner on the table at the appointed time (whenever that may be)? Are clean clothes available? The answers to all these questions is “yes.” So…while no old men were harmed in the course of this experiment, the experiment itself was kinda dumb. And while I did get a lil bit caught up on my dead-tree reading I’m not sure being “off the ‘net” was worth all the mental anguish involved.

And Boy-Howdy do I ever have a lot of catching up to do!

Today’s Pic… is a re-run from about this time last year. No particular reason, I just like the pic. Those Czechs sure do good advertising!

Taken in Prague during The Great European Divorce Tour, June 1999.