McConnell retreats on NIE

http://www.nysun.com/article/70818

I know some of you want to pretend Iran isn't a problem, but they're not going away.

[rquoter]U.S. Spy Chief Retreats on Iran Estimate

BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 6, 2008
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/70818

WASHINGTON — The director of national intelligence is backing away from his agency's assessment late last year that Iran had halted its nuclear program, saying he wishes he had written the unclassified version of the document in a different manner.

At a hearing yesterday of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the intelligence director, Michael McConnell, said, "If I had 'til now to think about it, I probably would change a few things." He later added, "I would change the way we describe the Iranian nuclear program. I would have included that there are the component parts, that the portion of it, maybe the least significant, had halted."

Mr. McConnell was referring to the specific Iranian program to design potential nuclear warheads, which the December estimate said had halted in 2003. But in his opening testimony, Mr. McConnell noted that two other components of the nuclear program were moving ahead — the enrichment of uranium, which he said was the most difficult part of making a bomb, and the development of long-range missiles capable of hitting North Africa and Europe.

The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program released on December 3 distinguished Iran's enrichment of uranium at Natanz and Arak from its formal nuclear weapons program, which it said had halted in 2003 after the American invasion of Iraq.

Yesterday, Mr. McConnell struck a different tone. "Declared uranium enrichment efforts, which will enable the production of fissile material, continue. This is the most difficult challenge in nuclear production. Iran's efforts to perfect ballistic missiles that can reach North Africa and Europe also continue."

He went on, "We remain concerned about Iran's intentions and assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons."

The release of the December 2007 estimate at best delayed American diplomatic efforts to pass a third U.N. Security Council resolution sanctioning Iran's uranium enrichment, an activity the mullahs have continued for two years despite warnings from all five permanent members of the security council. The estimate also drew rare rebukes from American allies, including Israel, France, and the United Kingdom who said their intelligence agencies did not concur with the American assessment that Iran had frozen its plan to produce an A-bomb.

The release of the declassified estimate also contradicted Mr. McConnell's own stated policy of keeping intelligence estimates secret. On Tuesday he said that on November 27, when his analysts presented him with the new Iran estimate, he decided he had to make the conclusions public because both he and his predecessor had been on record warning of Iran's nuclear weapons program and the new intelligence in part contradicted that.

The timing of Mr. McConnell's pivot is also significant. On January 22 in Berlin, all five permanent veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council plus the Germans agreed on a draft third resolution against Iran. Mr. McConnell predicted that it would pass the council this month. At the same time, other members of the Security Council, such as South Africa have recently warned against a third resolution. The Russians last month completed a deal to provide Iran with nuclear fuel for a separate reactor in Bushehr.

Tuesday's testimony from Mr. McConnell was part of an annual report from his directorate on threats to America. In his testimony, the national intelligence director warned specifically of potential al Qaeda attacks within America.

He said that America was not immune from the threat of "homegrown" "al Qaeda inspired" cells, similar to those that have sprouted up in Europe. Noting the rise in radical Sunni Islamist Web sites, he said that these cells in America so far have been cruder than the European variety.

"To date, cells detected in the United States have lacked the level of sophistication, experience, and access to resources of terrorist cells overseas," Mr. McConnell said. "Their efforts, when disrupted, largely have been in the nascent phase, and authorities often were able to take advantage of poor operational tradecraft. However, the growing use of the internet to identify and connect with networks throughout the world offers opportunities to build relationships and gain expertise that previously were available only in overseas training camps."

Of interest to Democratic senators at yesterday's hearing was the CIA's stance on coercive interrogation and in particular the practice of simulating drowning in terrorist suspects, a practice known as water boarding. For the first time in public, the CIA named the three people it had subjected to the practice, considered a form of torture by the Geneva conventions.

The three individuals include the main plotter of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; the mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri; and another alleged high level al Qaeda operative named Abu Zubaydeh. This last person's significance has been questioned by some journalists and former officials, and he is said by some to have provided bogus information when he was interrogated.[/rquoter]

 

wrong- i want intel i can trust. and i don't trust iran- if you had any sense, neither would you.

 

one wonders why some many are so anxious to be so gullible.

http://www.nysun.com/article/70864

[rquoter]Correcting the CIA
New York Sun Editorial
February 7, 2008

What a difference two months make. On December 3, when the director of national intelligence released an estimate of Iran's nuclear program that said the Mullahs had suspended its bomb making in 2003, the left could barely contain its glee. The New York Times featured a front page analysis that said, "Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate here." The Majority Leader, Senator Reid took the opportunity of its release to call again for a "surge of diplomacy with Iran." Senator Obama said, "The juxtaposition of this NIE with the president's suggestion of World War III serves as an important reminder of what we learned with the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq: members of Congress must carefully read the intelligence before giving the President any justification to use military force."

Careful, indeed. It turns out that on Tuesday, as our Eli Lake reported on page one of yesterday's Sun, the director of national intelligence, Mr. McConnell says he now regrets the phrasing of the unclassified estimate that so stirred America's enthusiasts of diplomacy. In testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Mr. McConnell went further. He noted that Iran is developing both the long range ballistic missiles and the nuclear fuel for a potential weapon. What had halted, it turns out, was work to design the actual warhead and secret enrichment activity. The Iranians continued to enrich uranium in the open in Natanz in defiance of two Security Council resolutions.

As for the secret enrichment and weapons design, Mr. McConnell is not even sure as of mid-2007 whether the Iranians have restarted this work. "We assess with moderate confidence that Tehran had not restarted these activities as of mid-2007, but since they comprised an unannounced secret effort which Iran attempted to hide, we do not know if these activities have been restarted," he told the assembled senators. So why then did the opening sentence of the December 3 assessment state with no equivocation, "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program"? Mr. McConnell said that it was because he had to assemble quickly a declassified estimate in late November and that it did not occur to him that this kind of declarative statement would confuse the issue.

For the unelected intelligence bureaucrats who pushed through December's distortion and the newspapers that cheered them on, the walk back from the director is a serious blow. It's hard to recall a situation quite like it. Only a few lines about Mr. McConnell's testimony on this point appeared in yesterday's New York Times, and that was buried in a story that focused on the improvements Al Qaeda has been making in its ability to strike the home front. Yet for a brief moment the unclassified assessment about which Mr. McConnell now has regrets ended political debate about the urgency of stopping the world's leading sponsor of Islamic terror from obtaining an apocalyptic arsenal.

* * *

It's a lesson to remember. Mr. McConnell's regrets came in questioning from Senator Bayh, a Democrat from Indiana who once harbored hopes of running for president before his party was taken over by the likes of moveon.org. Mr. Bayh cited an article about the estimate that was issued Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal and written by John Bolton, the man accused three years ago, when President Bush nominated him to be ambassador to the United Nations, of intimidating all those intelligence professionals. We'd like to think Mr. McConnell's correction will steer the American debate on how best to counter the threat from the Iranians away from the aspirations of our professional diplomats and spies to appease them and back toward an unvarnished view of the danger that is building in Iran.[/rquoter]